What Structured Cabling Is And How It Applies To Phone Service
Unless you work in an IT department or work for a cable TV and phone company, you might not know what "structured cabling" means. You could guess, based on the two words involved, what it means, but you would not know what this is used for, or how it applies to many of the services in your commercial building. It helps to not only know what structured cabling is but how it applies to phone service and whether or not it can benefit you and your building in this way.
Structured Cabling: What It Is
If there is a tech room on your property where the tall computer towers sit with dozens of colored wires sticking out all over, this is your communications room. (It may even be labeled "communications room" above the door or to the side of it.) This is the main part of structured cabling, the end zone where all of the building's communications cables come to plug into the towers. The larger cables that enter the room do so typically through the ceiling and above the ceiling tiles, where the cables remain out of sight. These cables continue back to a router or gateway router, which then connects to other components before connecting to every computer, phone and/or TV in your building.
How Structured Cabling Relates to Phone Service
Structured cabling can provide phone service either over-the-internet or via traditional telephone lines. VOiP protocols (voice over internet protocols) are primarily concerned with telephone service over the same cables used for internet. If these structured cables are made of fiber optic bundles, you may experience far better phone service, which is vital to commercial properties where call centers and other large batch phone services are required for daily operations.
If you would rather have a POTS (plain old telephone service), the telephone cables are the same that they have been for decades, but can connect to your communication towers through their own ports. Surges in power could cause your POTS service to fail or drop calls, a feature that makes this a major drawback in business. However, if you have VOiP instead of POTS, a power surge has little effect on connectivity unless the power surge shuts off every computer in your entire building. Ergo, you may want POTS as a backup service, and then utilize the VOiP provided by structured cabling as your primary phone service on the property.