...truly independent

As one of the few truly independent consulting organisations in the field of telecommunications cabling, The Cabling Partnership is able to provide services to both the supply- and client-sides of the industry.

...client-side

The Cabling Partnership is able to provide a range of services to client-side organisations such as:
premises owners;
tenants;
specialist (e.g. IT) consulting organisations;
general (e.g. M & E) consulting organisations.

...services

The Cabling Partnership is pleased to provide a wide range of services to the client-side of the industry covering the selection and specification of cabling infrastructures, the quality assurance of their installation and effective administration of their operation.

All the products and services provided are founded on direct involvement in standardisation of telecommunications (IT) cabling via both the formal standards bodies (BSI, CENELEC and ISO/IEC) and industry bodies such as the FIA and TIA-B.

Who needs a strategy?

As of February 2008, there are five standardised transmission specifications applicable to balanced cabling and a similar number for optical fibre. It would be tempting to say either "I will have the cheapest" or "I will have the best" but that is not such a straightforward option.

In order to obtain the best value for money one has to consider the applications to be supported over the cabling.

All of the principal balanced cabling options
(Class D/Category 5e, Class E/Category 6,
Class Ea/Augmented Category 6, Class F
and Class Fa) are capable of supporting
1000BASE-T and certainly the last three
will support 10GBASE-T.

While all of the principal optical fibre cabling
options (OM1, OM2, OM3, OS1 and OS2)
will support 100Mb/s applications
over 2000 metres, only OM3 and OS1,2
will support 10Gb/s over 300 metres - and the
cost differential between multimode and
singlemode solutions is dropping rapidly.

Therefore, in some circumstances the cheapest may also be the best - depending upon ones approach. It is impossible to determine a infrastructure strategy without having a clear understanding of the application strategy.

Equally one cannot ignore the next generation of applications that are in development - these may be mainstream during the lifetime of the infrastructures installed this year.

The Cabling Partnership is able to provide detailed analyses of the available options to enable clients to determine appropriate infrastructure strategies.

What is a procurement strategy?

In theory, "mix and match" components provide acceptable performance for the lowest cost without any ongoing responsibility on behalf of the client.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, premium cabling solutions come at a price, with a performance guarantee and with a set of terms and conditions that underpin that guarantee. The basic question for a client is whether or not their adminstration systems allow the terms of the guarantee to be honoured. If not, is the guarantee worth having?

The Cabling Partnership is able to provide detailed analyses of the available options to enable clients to determine appropriate infrastructure procurement strategies.

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Infrastructure implementation options 1995-2010