Hospitals and other medical facilities face daunting new IT challenges as every facet of care increasingly relies on networked electronics. Berk-Tek and Legrand | Ortronics highlight key trends and opportunities to address these changes through structured cabling best practices.

Many structured cabling vendors submit their products to third-party verification programs that perform testing to TIA-568. Some go a step further and have independent verification to their own specifications that are commonly better than the minimum requirements from TIA. This paper will explain why this is important and how this will affect your network. The difference between channel and component testing and why you need both will also be discussed.

The increasing global awareness of the impact that products and the manufacturing processes used to make them has on the ecology has prompted efforts to control and ameliorate this impact. There have been efforts that focus on pursuing consensus to reduce both emissions and material consumption. Other efforts have been targeted at improving processes with the goal of reducing global repercussions. Recently, the European Union has implemented a set of requirements for a specific family of products and materials. The intent is to reduce and eventually eliminate their future ecological impact. These requirements, colloquially known as RoHS and WEEE, have been referenced or adopted into the legislation of many nations that are moving toward increased ecological responsiveness. Increasingly, this means that compliance to the requirements of RoHS and/or WEEE may well be mandated outside of the European Union in the near future.