When a network crawls, everyone blames the internet provider or the switches. In our experience walking into client sites, the real culprit is usually invisible: the cabling. Here are the mistakes we find again and again, and what doing it right looks like.
A surprising amount of so-called Cat6 in the market is copper-clad aluminium or simply mislabelled. It crimps fine, works on day one, and then fails fluke testing, drops PoE cameras and throttles transfers forever after. Genuine cable from brands like Molex, CommScope or D-Link, bought through authorised channels, costs slightly more once and saves the entire rework bill later.
Cables pulled along whatever path was easiest, taped to power lines, stretched tight around corners, crossing ceilings unprotected. Data cable run parallel to power picks up interference; runs beyond 90 metres quietly fail. Proper structured cabling starts with route planning and containment, trays, raceways and separation from power, before a single box is opened.
Open the network rack at many offices and you find spaghetti: nothing labelled, patch cords of wild lengths, no documentation of which port feeds which desk. Every future fault becomes an archaeology project. A disciplined installation ends with a dressed rack, labelled points at both ends, and a simple map your IT person can actually use. Troubleshooting time drops from days to minutes.
Termination is not the finish line, testing is. Each point should be verified end to end and the results recorded. If your installer cannot hand over test results and labelled documentation, you have not bought structured cabling, you have bought wires.
Cabling outlives the equipment attached to it, often by a decade. Laying only exactly the points you need today means paying mobilisation costs again next year. Plan spare capacity at the rack and a few extra points per area, and consider fibre for backbones between floors and buildings, bandwidth demands only move one direction.
Copper has a hard limit: 90 metres per run and finite bandwidth shared across a floor. Sites that link buildings, floors or distant camera clusters over long copper runs, or worse, daisy-chained switches, build congestion and instability into the network's spine. A modest fibre optic backbone between racks removes the distance limit entirely and carries future bandwidth increases without re-laying anything.
Fibre is no longer exotic or fragile, and splicing is routine work for our teams. If your site spans more than one building or more than a couple of floors, the backbone should be fibre; the economics have long since settled that argument.
When a structured cabling job finishes properly, you should receive four things: a labelled rack whose ports match labelled wall points, a simple point-to-point map of the installation, test results for every terminated point, and warranty details for the components used. Keep them with your IT documentation.
That handover pack is not paperwork for its own sake. The first time a desk goes dead, your IT person traces it in minutes with the map instead of tracing cable through a ceiling, and that single incident usually repays the discipline of the entire installation.
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