guidelines for wiring an office

Does anyone have a link for recommended network wiring for office space? Runs per wall plate, wall plates per room, that sort of thing.

If you're willing to spend a little money, you can get the "bible" for cabling installers: The "Information Transport Systems Installation Methods Manual" from BICSI. It's $129.00, but it's got an unbelievable amount of detailed information.

If you're worried about legal compliance, check with your local electrical or building inspector. Most states don't classify "low voltage data cable" under electrical inspection guidelines, but you may have fire inspection-releated concerns.

Here are my personal takes on cabling:

• Run more cable than you think you're going to need. The wire is cheap, the installation labor is not.
• Use well-labeled wall plates with some kind of documented labeling standard. It shouldn't be complicated, but it should be documented.
• If you can, create an as-built drawing. It will help you (or the next guy) when problems come up.
• No matter where you put wall plates, users will put bookcases, desks, 1000 pound safes, etc, in front of them. Try and get in touch with the office space-planning people to see where good wall-plate locations would be.
• If you're still using traditional non-IP telephones, coordinate with your voice vendor to run a single cable plant for everything if you are able. You can plug RJ-11 jacks into RJ-45 wall plates. Some people say that it's not a good thing to do, but I've seen it done for years w/ no ill effects.
• Run more cable than you think you're going to need. >smile< Having to put switches in offices because you add IP phones, network-printers, and an Ethernet-attached camera where you thought that only a PC was going to be located is no fun.

For a typical high-tech office with less than 50 people, run 3 CAT6 cables to every office or workstation and terminate them as RJ45 walljacks. Make them all home runs back to your server room.

If you are using IP phones, terminate them all to RJ45 patch panels in a 2-post rack with your switches. If you aren't using IP phones, terminate 1 out of each group of 3 to a BIX patch panel. If you convert to IP later, it will be a simple matter or reterminating them to RJ45 patch panels.

Get a floor plan and number all of the walljack locations. Get it printed big, laminate it, and post it by your patch panel with a dry-erase marker.

Insist that your contractor test them with some sort of signal tester and not just a tone test. We found that about 1% of our runs were unusable for Gigabit Ethernet. Luckily, we have enough spare runs that we just left them broken and negotiated a 1% refund.

...from my personal experiences:

General info:
- the standard wallplate I use, has 2 RJ45-ports
- I recommend Cat.5e or Cat.6 cabling (a question of budget)
(should work with a wide range of services - Gbit/Phones/Extenders)
- Terminate all ports from the wallplates on a patchpanel in your techroom
- I tag the patchpanels with letters A,B,C,etc. - so I can tag the ports
at the wallplates with A1, A2, etc. - this makes the wireplan independent
of organizational changes
- make a floorplan with all ports on it (see other post above)
- if the wiring is done by an external company, etc. let them make a test
protocol for every port, to prove that they all work perfectly (see other post)

Officeworker: needs 4 Ports
- 1 for PC/Workstation
- 1 for Phone (analog, digital or VoIP)
- 1 for additional Laptop
- 1 spare (e.g. local Networkprinter)

Programmer/Techguy: needs 6 Ports
- 1 for PC/Workstation
- 1 for Phone (analog, digital or VoIP)
- 1 for Laptop/2nd Workstation
- 1 for testing (to set up the new Laptop of HR, etc.)
- 1 for multipurpose (admin-network, second phone, etc.)
- 1 spare

Room/Office:
- amount of people how will work there (see above)
- ports for central Networkprinters, Copiers, Faxes, etc.

Ok, enough text for now, have fun...