A survey of structured cabling in mainland China

Abstract

Selection of the cabling media to be used is often difficult, and installation of vertical and horizontal structured cabling is costly and disruptive. Bandwidth, distance requirements, immunity to interference, security, installation disruption and future technology should all be considered when selecting appropriate transmission media. Further, organisational characteristics such as industry, network size, and budget may also influence the cabling selection.In order to maximise ROI, organizations want to avoid replacing infrastructure after a short time-span, and thus want to ensure that future technologies will operate over the chosen media. However, this is problematic because there are currently no clear industry favourite transmission media; previous research has shown that copper, fibre, and wireless media all have their proponents who are equally adamant that their particular medium is the best choice.Research described in this paper reports which factors influence the cable selection decision in mainland China. The findings can be used to improve cable decision selection in the future.