Structured cabling pro-am: The week's top 5 stories

Here's our weekly round-up of the top structured cabling industry news stories and featured articles for ICT and IT industry professionals, as compiled by the editors of Cabling Installation & Maintenance magazine and CablingInstall.com.

As defined by Wikipedia: Pro–am (or pro/am, pro am, ProAm; a contraction of professional–amateur) is a mix of professional and amateur competition within a sport, or collaboration between professionals and amateurs in a scientific discipline.

Photo: Sumitomo

1.) PRO-:Top 10 global ribbon fiber-optic cable suppliers identified

This short February 2018 article has been one of CablingInstall.com's top-ranked Google Search finds for weeks, luring the curious into our realm of structured cabling industry coverage. What's that tell you?

2.) AM-:Question re: Connecting phone extensions around house w/ Cat 5e cables after Comcast installation fail?

An opportunity to check in on the caliber of professional advice being dispensed at Reddit's "Home Improvement" sub-community, as pertains to residential structured cabling, is here presented.

3.) Crown Castle conducts Los Angeles fiber-optic network expansion

Crown Castle International Corp. said it plans to expand its fiber-optic network footprint throughout the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. The fiber-optic network enhancement will provide customers with full access to Crown Castle’s national network of more than 60,000 route miles of fiber. The multimillion dollar project also will see the company expand its fiber network in surrounding areas in Southern California and is expected to be completed this coming January. Currently serving the Los Angeles metro and Southern California customers via 5,674 route miles of fiber connected to 1,921 on-net buildings, Crown Castle also offers data center services at three locations (624 South Grand Avenue, 600 West 7th Street, and 530 West 6th Street) and offers connectivity to another 18 data centers in the area.

Photo: R&M

4.) What edge computing means for the future of the data center

In a new article for Computer Business Review, Raghavan Srinivasan, senior director of enterprise data solutions at Seagate Technology, predicts that "the large traditional data center has been the mainstay of computing and connectivity networks for more than half a century – and essentially all processing of transactions have been carried out in a centralized core – but mobility, technological advancements and economic demand mean that businesses will increasingly add edge elements to this essential core."

5.)Editorial: Data centers are like life

By PATRICK MCLAUGHLIN, Chief Editor, Cabling Installation & Maintenance -- We commonly hear that such-and-such an experience is "like life." Often the phrase is applied to youth sports. But closer to our collective professional sphere, I have observed that in some ways, data centers are like life.

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