In 1997, the University of Rochester Medical Center (Rochester, NY) was installing a new fiber-optic infrastructure. It was a huge project: a 4-million-square-foot building with a backbone consisting of more than 10,000 strands of optical fiber that had to be connectorized and patched.
To avoid confusion arising from different-color adapters, Todd Taylor of the University of Rochester Medical Center worked with Rudy Montgelas of Hubbell Premise Wiring (Stonington, CT) to customize the colors of the duplex SC adapter bulkheads for the new infrastructure. Because the center`s Asynchronous Transfer Mode network was capable of dedicated 10-, 100-, and 155-megabit-per-second transmission over Category 5 cable from the telecommunications closet to the work area, there was very little fiber-to-the-desk--mostly singlemode fiber for fractional T1s.
Based on the quantity of duplex adapters that the project would require, Hubbell agreed to custom-manufacture the orange and yellow adapters. If adapters in these colors were good for the University of Rochester Med- ical Center, then why not for elsewhere? Responses to a questionnaire from installers around the country confirmed what Taylor and Montgelas already believed: Orange and yellow adapters made sense. So much sense that Hubbell now offers these adapters as a standard product.
While this solution--yellow to yellow and orange to orange--works well for the closet, it still leaves the work area looking as if Marge Simpson did the decor. Would it not be better to have tia/eia-568b, the next generation of the Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling Standard, allow either the yellow and orange or the blue and beige? As chair of the Installation Task Group, I presented this anomaly to the Fiber Optic Task Group for consideration at its August meeting, and I will report their determination in a forthcoming issue of Cabling Installation & Maintenance.
