March 11, 2009--The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has released two cabling standards: the new TIA-568-C.0 Generic Telecommunications Cabling for Customer Premises and the TIA-568-C.1 Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard revision.
The new standards improve upon and replace TIA-568-B.1 and its addenda, which were reviewed and revised under the cognizance of TIA Engineering Committee TR-42 Telecommunications Cabling Systems, and TR-42.1 Subcommittee on Generic and Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling.
These two new documents will be combined with TIA-568-C.3 Optical Fiber Cabling Components Standard (which was published in June 2008 and is available now) and TIA-568-C.2, Balanced Twisted-Pair Telecommunications Cabling and Components Standard (release expected later in 2009) to become the TIA-568-C suite of standards.
TR-42 Committee chairman Herb Congdon, manager of standards and technology for Amp NETCONNECT Systems at Tyco Electronics, said that during the review process, "the committee sought and considered feedback from users of the TIA standards collection, and asked: 'What can we do to make the standards easier to use?' We recognized the need for what we called a generic structured cabling document. And that's what the 568-C.0 standard is." Congdon calls the new suite of standards "more efficient and effective."
"The new document [TIA-568-C.0] becomes the foundation for new premises telecommunications cabling infrastructure standards. All of the common information is now contained in one place," Congdon says. "It also becomes a standard that you can use if there's not an existing standard that covers the type of premises that you're working on--say, for example, an airport--and it can get you a baseline network that will work in those types of facilities."
The purpose of TIA-568-C.0 is to enable the planning and installation of a structured cabling system for all types of customer premises. The standard specifies a system that will support generic telecommunications cabling in a multi-product, multi-vendor environment.
TIA-568-C.0 specifies generic telecommunications cabling requirements, including cabling system structure, topologies and distances, installation, performance and testing.
Additional requirements are detailed in standards specific to types of premises. For example, TIA-568-C.1 contains additional requirements applicable to office-oriented commercial building cabling.
On the Web: www.tiaonline.org