A task group within the Telecommunications Industry Association's (TIA) TR-42.1 Subcommittee on Commercial Building Telecommunications Cabling is progressing on a project to develop a standard for cabling systems in educational facilities.
To this point the Educational Facilities Task Group within TR-42.1 has conducted mock ballots on TIA-4966 Telecommunications Infrastructure for Educational Buildings. TR-42.1 meets again the week of October 1-5.
From TIA documentation, it is apparent that distributed antenna systems (DAS) infrastructure is among the topics the task group is tackling. At its most recent meeting, held in June (official meeting report document available for viewing here), TR-42.1 took up the issue of establishing a set of specifications for DAS. However, the meeting report says the subcommittee "agreed to defer a decision until after further work has been done on DAS in TIA-4966, and further tasked the Educational Facilities Task Group to develop a recommendation for further action regarding a course of action regarding a separate document for DAS."
According to a document created by and available from Nexans, TIA-4966 "is being developed to support primary and secondary schools, e.g. K-12, libraries, and related facilities. Similar to healthcare facility cabling, there are special considerations for outlet spacing, density and reach that are unique to the education application-space.
"The outstanding additions to this new standard," Nexans further explains, "are special considerations for broadband coaxial cabling, considerable information covering cabling for security systems and access controls, as well as energy management systems and controls; and guidelines for supporting mobile communications DAS in addition to LAN wireless access point distribution."
We will track progress of this TIA standard initiative and keep you informed as the project moves forward.
You can view the Nexans document, titled "Standards Watch," here.