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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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Figure 18-21 Solid and stranded core UTP

ANSI/TIA specifies that horizontal cabling should always be solid core.

Remember, this cabling is going into your walls and ceilings, safe from the

harmful effects of shoes and vacuum cleaners. The ceilings and walls enable

you to take advantage of the better conductivity of solid core without the risk

of cable damage. Stranded cable also has an important function in a

structured cabling network, but I need to discuss a few more parts of the

network before I talk about where to use stranded UTP cable.

The Telecommunications Room

The telecommunications room is the heart of the basic star. This room is

where all the horizontal runs from all the work areas come together. The

concentration of all this gear in one place makes the telecommunications

room potentially one of the messiest parts of the basic star. Even if you do a

nice, neat job of organizing the cables when they are first installed, networks

change over time. People move computers, new work areas are added,

network topologies are added or improved, and so on. Unless you impose

some type of organization, this conglomeration of equipment and cables

decays into a nightmarish mess.

Fortunately, the ANSI/TIA structured cabling standards define the use of

specialized components in the telecommunications room that make

organizing a snap. In fact, it might be fair to say that there are too many

options! To keep it simple, we’re going to stay with the most common

telecommunications room setup and then take a short peek at some other

fairly common options.

Equipment Racks The central component of every telecommunications

room is one or more equipment racks. An equipment rack provides a safe,

stable platform for all the different hardware components. All equipment

racks are 19 inches wide, but they vary in height from two- to three-foot-high

models that bolt onto a wall (see Figure 18-22) to the more popular floor-toceiling

models (see Figure 18-23).

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