Communications Room
The communications room or the communications cabinet location is the area where the building telecommunications systems are usually centrally located. Dependent on the size, age and nature of the business, the communications room could be housed in a number of areas. Where there is more than one cabinet, the main distribution area (MDA) will contain the core telecommunications equipment. This connects to one or more smaller localised cabinets, referred to as a horizontal distribution area (HAD). Broadly speaking, for a small to average size office environment the communications room will be a small room, similar in dimension to a walk-in cupboard. It could be located at the end of a corridor, under stairs or an area away from the main office space. In some buildings, the communications cabinet will be located in an open office, for example on the wall or on the floor in the corner of an administration office.
Communications rooms and cabinets can get very untidy and fall into disarray; surplus equipment tends to be left in place with new equipment being installed alongside it, leading to untidy, inefficient communications cabinets which are difficult to maintain. An audit will highlight any issues or risks which may be present or may arise. Potential issues and risks include:
- Equipment overheating due to poor ventilation or lack of environmental control
- Poorly situated equipment in the cabinet making access difficult
- An overloaded power supply
- Poorly installed or excessive amounts of patch cords making maintenance impossible
- General office consumables such as Xmas trees and paper located on or around the cabinet
- Lack of an earth bonding for the cabinet
We provide a service to audit your existing communications cabinet or room. This audit will be presented as an “As Built” document. This will detail your current build state and make recommendations for any necessary alterations to bring it up to industry standards. We will present you with a plan of what to remove, how to repatch and recolour the patch cords, how to reposition equipment to improve the airflow, and whether extra power is needed or can be reduced, etc. We will work with you to build a communications room strategy and define capacity management, change management, estimate of energy usage, maintenance and security.