Q: I read in your column a letter by a woman who said she wanted to be in compliance with SP-2840A and TIA-568A (August 1994, page 44). Can you tell me what these are and give me information on where I can get details on them?
Rodney Welhert
U.S. Air Force
Spokane, WA
A: EIA/TIA-568 is the commercial building telecommunications cabling standard prepared by working group TR41.8.1 under the jurisdiction of subcommittee TR41.8 and approved by technical committee TR41 of the Telecommunications Industry Association. You may recognize this document by another name-Federal Information Processing Standards Publication (FIPS Pub) 174, the federal government`s version of the standard.
TIA`s TR41.8.1 working group has been revising EIA/TIA-568, and the new version is called EIA/TIA-568A. In other words, it is revision A of the original document.
The American National Standards Institute, through the EIA and TIA, reviews most of its standards every five years. At the end of each review period, standards are reaffirmed, rescinded or revised. When a document is under revision, a standard proposal number is assigned. This is to avoid confusion between the current document, which is the accepted standard, and any revisions that are under consideration by the committee. SP-2840A is the A revision of SP-2840, which will be released as EIA/TIA-568A.
Donna Ballast is a communications analyst at the University of Texas at Austin and a BICSI RCDD. Questions can be sent to her at Cabling Installation & Maintenance or at PO Drawer 7580, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78713. Phone (512) 471-0112, fax (512) 471-8883. Internet address: ballast@ utexas.edu.
