Setting the Standards for Connected and Efficient Buildings

This blog post is part of a series about intelligent buildings based on content from the CommScope Connected and Efficient Buildings e-book.

In the telecom, intelligent building and cabling industries, standards development organizations demonstrate considerable cooperation by providing viable solutions for growing communication needs. There are always numerous new and updated standards in development. For example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recently published the first international standard for Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM).

CommScope is very active in standards organizations and currently has employees chairing committees, providing technical expertise and helping progress standards to successful publication and deployment. Several CommScope associates have even been recognized with awards for their service to the IEC, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). It is important for our customers that we stay on the cutting-edge of network technology evolution.

In the Connected and Efficient Buildings e-book, CommScope gives an overview of the organizations most involved in cabling and connectivity standards for intelligent buildings. Here’s a summary of them and some recent developments:

• IEEE 802 is responsible for standards related to copper and fiber “Ethernet” applications ranging from 10 Mb/s to 400 Gb/s. These standards help enable the exponential growth of data traffic across different elements of communications networks in enterprises, data centers and metropolitan areas—touching most aspects of the way we work, play and live.

• ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 25/WG 3 and Related IEC Component Committees are active in developing cabling standards that support the IEEE 802 networking applications. This committee created the “structured cabling” paradigm that enabled many different applications to work over the same cabling topology and media types.

• IEC Copper and Fiber Components (Copper: TC 46 cables & TC 48 connectors, Fiber: TC 86) component committees work in tandem with the ISO WG3 cabling committee to develop specifications for components needed for the system solution. These specifications form the baseline for the development of practical products and components that can be used interchangeably with products from other vendors.

• INCITS Fiber Channel: Following a long history of successful applications starting at 132 Mb/s, Fiber Channel is developing 256 Gb/s over OS2 single mode as well as OM4 and OM5 (wideband) laser optimized, multimode fiber types. This technology is widely deployed in data center storage area networks, which have to offer comparable high speed, low latency access as that demanded of local area networks.

• ANSI TIA TR42 was the first organizations to establish a “hierarchical star” wired networking topology in the TIA-568 standard for buildings back in 1990, creating a unified network topology to support voice, data, and video communications over the same network. Since then TIA TR42 has continued to be the leading forum to create a wide range of related standards including TIA-569 for pathways and spaces, TIA-606 for administration, TIA-607 for bonding and grounding, and TIA-5017 for physical network security.

• CENELEC TC215 standards generally follow the ISO WG3 standards and are widely adopted in most European Union (EU) countries and beyond. CENELEC has played a leading role in development of cabling requirements in support of remote powering applications such as Power over Ethernet (PoE).

• 2017 NEC NFPA 70 regulations: The 2017 revision of the NEC NFPA 70 national electrical code includes two new articles related to power delivery over data cables. These articles are being reviewed by a NEC Task Group to align better with the remote power applications and cabling standards, thus avoiding confusion for installers and inspectors.

To learn more about networking standards for intelligent buildings, check out the CommScope Connected and Efficient Buildings e-book and resources available on our website. If you have any questions, please leave me a comment.