Friday, January 15, 2010

Network cable trays

One or two readers may think that the pictures of network cable trays and trunking may be a little bit out of place in this blog. However, when it comes to construction of new buildings, it has become one of the usual practices to include the installation of cable management infrastructure for information technology (IT) services under the electrical works contract.

Picture 1 – Riser cable tray for the computer network cabling



The above picture was taken at an office building under construction. The white-colored cable tray is located inside the ELV riser shaft. ELV stands for Extra Low Voltage.

Most of the time there are number of services under the category of electrical services inside a multistory. Even some parts of the fire protection system are categorized under the electrical services such as the fireman intercom.

In multi-storey buildings, these ELV services are provided with their own riser shaft and the rising main for all the ELV services are located here. This usually include telephone, public announcement, fireman intercom, closed circuit TV (CCTV), master antenna TV (MATV) or satellite TV, and all types of inter-floor audio-visual communication systems.

When the building-wide computer to computer communications came to be widely used, then the need to provide for them became part of the design criteria for building designers and electrical consultants.

However, usually the details available to the designers during the design and construction of the building are not enough for a complete and proper implementation of the IT systems. For some building projects who tried to fully implement it together with the main building contract, various problems have been common.

Some projects even faced delays in completion and handover because of this IT system.
Partly because of this reason, many owners choose to implement the IT system on their own after the building handover.

The main contract of the building works then is instructed to prepare the cable management infrastructure to accommodate the IT cabling that would come after the completion and handover of the building. This infrastructure usually includes all the rooms, spaces, cable risers, trays, conduit and trunking for the computer network.

Even the server rooms are usually prepared and ready with raised floor system, 24-hour air-conditioning system and suitable fire protection systems.

The only scope of work left to the IT contractors is the cabling and wiring installation, and the computer hardware.

That is what the contract arrangement has been for this building contract. The white cable tray is for the computer cabling. A complete management system infrastructure has been prepared including the underfloor trunking system.

I do not have the digital copy of pictures for underfloor trunking system. You will be able to see them in this blog soon. However, two more pictures below shows the normal trunking that has been installed (actually the work was still in progress when these pictures were taken).

Picture 2 - Computer cable trunking inside riser shaft



Picture 3 – Computer cable trunking coming down from ceiling.




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