Network cable color conventions? [closed]
Are there any color conventions for network cable? I'm talking jacket color here, not the color of the individual conductors. I've seen and used mostly grey and blue which is what's usually readily available. I have to make a few runs and using some color would help differentiate them up in the rafters. However, I don't want to choose a particular color if it has some special meaning in the realm of professional installers.
While I doubt there is not a universal convention for colouring network cables (we use yellow for staff lan, green for test lan, blue for voice, orange for fibre, red for firewall / public lan), it's more important that you:
- Define a standard that is relevent to your requirements
- Document, publish and publicise the standard
- Adhere to the standards
In my experience (and I'm NOT a networks person btw), but rushed and hurried network installations take a VERY long time to fix. Poor cable management, poorly planned installations and messy unorganised cables (not just comms cables ;) is very unprofessional and very expensive to fix later.
There's no universal standard that I know of.
When we pulled Cat6 in our building a few years ago, we implemented our own standard.
In the cable closets:
- normal patch cables were grey
- any special connections (e.g. a couple offices connected to the DMZ) were red or yellow
- a couple of offices were cross-connected using purple
- temporary connections were white
In the server room:
- blue for normal servers
- red for servers in the DMZ
- green for external connections
- white and purple as for wiring closets - temp and cross-connect
At one point we ordered some cross-over cables and they came in orange, so we threw out all of our white home-made ones and only used orange for cross-over.
The only one I thought may be a defacto standard was red for crossover. I've seen red used for both, but 9 times out of 10 if I find a red patch cable somewhere it is a crossover.
Other than that, I've seen orange, green, blue, grey, yellow, etc all used for all kinds of uses.
In our office, we did standardize a bit with orange for data and green for voice. We were using a VoIP phone system so in reality they were all just data runs for 2 LANs. Plus the phones have a pass-through LAN in them and will VLAN tag the phone and data for two different VLANs. So in the end it wasn't really necessary.
I did see neon pink in a data closet today and was a bit curious about that. It seemed to just be part of all the other data runs though, so maybe it was just someone got the pink cable on the cheap because nobody else wanted it :).