Diane Forbes, chief operating officer of NIS, recently was elevated from vice-chair to chair of the Telecommunications Industry Association’s (TIA) TR-42.1 Premises Telecommunications Infrastructure Subcommittee. TR-42.1’s previous chair, Joe Cody, recently retired from Corning Inc. Coinciding with Forbes’s elevation to chair, Ray Emplit, datacom standards manager with Harger Lightning & Grounding, was named vice-chair of TR-42.1.
According to the TIA’s website, the TR-42.1 subcommittee “develops and maintains cabling standards for generic customer-owned telecommunications networks. These standards are intended to specify open systems designed to support a wide variety of voice, data, video and other low-voltage, power-limited applications. Also, this subcommittee develops and maintains telecommunications cabling standards for premises networks such as commercial buildings, data centers, building automation. This subcommittee specifies cabling system topology, architecture, design, installation, testing and performance requirements.”
In an interview with Cabling Installation & Maintenance in 2019, Forbes discussed her transition from a career in biochemistry to information and communications technology (ICT), and her involvement in standards development. Shortly after joining NIS, she began attending TIA meetings. “I’m of the mindset that jumping in is the way to go,” she told us. “That’s what I did with TIA. At my second meeting I volunteered to be an editor on the TSB dealing with DAS, and it has grown from there. I had been in the medical field for a long time, and TIA has enabled me to learn as much as possible, quickly. There’s nothing like standards work to keep you current.”
The TR-42 Telecommunications Cabling Systems Committee comprises multiple subcommittees, including TR-42.1, TR-42.3 Telecommunications Administration, Pathways, Spaces, Bonding and Grounding, TR-42.5 Telecommunications Infrastructure Terms and Symbols, TR-42.7 Telecommunications Copper Cabling Systems, TR-42.9 Industrial Telecommunications Infrastructure, TR-42.11 Optical Fiber Systems, TR-42.12 Optical Fibers and Cables, and TR-42.13 Passive Optical Devices and Fiber Optic Metrology.
TR-42 meets as a group three times per year, and several of its subcommittees as well as a number of task groups within those subcommittees meet more frequently. TR-42 will hold its next two meetings (in June and October) virtually.