Entrance Facilities and the Cables That Feed Your Building

We break down the entrance facility as the building’s lifeline, explain demarcation and ownership, and show how bonding, grounding, and the 50‑foot rule protect uptime. We compare underground, direct buried, aerial, tunnel, and wireless entrances with clear pros, cons, and field tips.

• what the entrance facility includes and where it lives
• demarcation point meaning, color coding, and ownership
• sleeves, conduits, protection devices, and splice hardware
• field tasks for routing, sealing, surge protection, and terminations
• troubleshooting dial tone at the demarc with a butt set
• bonding and grounding basics and AHJ interpretations
• the 50‑foot rule and listed vs unlisted cable
• underground conduit advantages, sealing, and pulling tension
• direct buried tradeoffs, locating, tracer wire, and documentation
• aerial cost benefits, wind and ice risks, and drip loops
• tunnels and high‑heat safety considerations
• wireless links, weatherproofing, and coax practices
• copper, fiber, and coax variants and handling
• key takeaways to choose the right entrance method

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Community Updates
• 0:50 Subscribe, Ratings, And Live Q&A
• 2:10 What An Entrance Facility Is
• 4:30 Demarcation, Ownership, And Hardware
• 7:10 Field Tasks And Troubleshooting At The Demarc
• 10:20 Bonding, Grounding, And The 50‑Foot Rule
• 13:20 AHJ Nuance And Compliance
• 14:43 Sponsor Break: Advertising Opportunity
• 15:30 Five Outside Connectivity Methods Overview
• 16:50 Underground Conduit: Pros, Cons, Best Practices
• 21:40 Sealing, Water Intrusion, And Pulling Tension
• 24:20 Direct Buried Cable: Tradeoffs And Locating
• 28:40 Miss Utility, Damage Risk, And Cold Weather

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Hey Wonder Monkeys, welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Cabling. This episode we're talking about entrance facilities and the cables that you will find there. Where we're connecting at the human level so that we can connect the world. If you're watching this show on YouTube, would you mind hitting that subscribe button and the bell button to be notified when new content is being produced? If you're watching us on one of the audio podcast platforms, would you mind leaving us a five-star rating? Those simple little steps help us take on the algorithm so we can educate, encourage, and enrich the lives of people in the ICT industry. Wednesday night, 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, what are you doing? You know I do a live stream on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, everywhere I can figure out where I can send this information where you get to ask your favorite. You know I'm your favorite, your favorite RCD. Questions on installation, design, project management, estimation. I even do career path questions. But I can hear you my joke, I'm joking, my joke, I lose the answer. I know where to get into the documents. Relax. Take a deep breath. Exhale. I record them and you can watch them at your convenience. And finally, while this show is free and will always remain free if you find value in this content. Would you click on that QR code right there? You can schedule a 15-minute one-on-one call with me. After hours, of course. Or you can even buy Let's Talk Cabling Merchandise or even buy me a cup of coffee. So today I want to talk about the entrance facility and the types of ways that you'll find connectivity to that entrance facility. You see, everything you install inside that building, that Cat 5E, that Cat 6, that Cat 6A cable, it's only going to be as good as what feeds it from the outside. If the entrance facility goes sideways, then guess what? Your whole building is going to go dark. So the first part we're going to do is we're going to explain what is an entrance facility, what all does that include, and why technicians should actually care about that. Now, in plain language, what is an entrance facility? It's really nothing but a cross-connect field, sometimes in a room by itself, sometimes not in a room by itself. It's usually located on the exterior wall of the building, usually on the first floor, sometimes even the first subterranean floor. That's where the outside plant cable comes into the building. The outside plant cable is sometimes customer-owned outside plant cabling, and sometimes it's access provider or service provider-owned cabling. The entrance facility is the transition point between the outside plant cable and the inside plant cable. You might even hear it referred to as a demarcation point. Now, demarcation is just a big fancy word that means change of ownership. And if you go by the colors found in the Bixie It's a manual, orange is the color that we use to signify demarcation point. So when you walk into an entrance facility and you see a whole bunch of blocks terminative and you see orange, that is the change of ownership between the service provider or the access provider and your customer. In that entrance facility, we're also going to use that to protect, route, and even transition the cable that enters into the building. So I want to break this down so even my my my installers can visualize this. You got this room or a portion of the room, and you're going to have these big black cables coming in from the outside. That's the service. I just thought of this. Just thought of this. Sometimes you hear the entrance facility referred to as the MPUP or MPOE. It's basically just where it comes into the build, minimum point of presence, minimum point of entry, or what those acronyms mean. So in that entrance facility, you're going to find potentially sleeves and conduits that come in from the outside. Sleeves and conduits that might go from one entrance facility to another entrance facility in another building or to another telecom room in that same building. You'll find the outside plant cables coming in, and that can be copper, that can be fiber. You're going to find primary surge protection, building entrance protection. Because every cable that runs between two buildings is susceptible to being hit by a lightning strike. Now there are three exceptions to that rule, but yeah, that's not today's class. Today's class. That's not today's show. So the cable is going to go to, might go to a building entrance terminal, building entrance protection. You're going to find maybe uh transition hardware like splice cases. You might find big brackets to hold that big 900-pair cable up or that big 144 strand of fiber coming up. Or sometimes those splices are used to transition from the outside plank cable to the inside plank cable because of what's called the 50-foot rule. We'll talk about that more in just a minute. So why does this matter to you as a field person, right? Because you might get asked to transition cables at the entrance facility. You might ask to have to run cables, new cables into the entrance facility. So you better know where it is. You better be familiar with the processes on how to seal that conduit once you bring it into the building, so no water, gases, or rodents can come in. And then run that route that cable through building entrance protection and then route it to whatever hub, router, phone switch, patch panel, termination block, whatever it is that they may terminate on. And there are lots and lots of options. And yes, Virginia, there are still 66 blocks, despite what a lot of people seem to think. You know, the reason why you might need to know where the entrance facility is, is you might get asked to troubleshoot telephone systems, you might or telephone lines. And one of the ways that you make sure is you gotta make sure that that dial tone is still coming into the building. And guess where that dial tone will be found? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. If you said the demarcation point, give yourself a pat on the back because yes, you will find it at the demarcation point. Then you can take your butt set, click it on the pins on the 66 block, and make sure that there's dial tone coming in the building. If you don't know what an entrance facility is or where the entrance facility is, you're not gonna be able to troubleshoot that phone. You can sit there, tone test the cable all day long. But if there's no dial tone coming into the building, you ain't getting dial tone to your phones or to your here's annoying for you, your fax machines. You may need to also understand bonding and grounding, surge protection, and fire stopping. Now, those are all separate shows all by themselves. But when an outside plant cable comes into the building, at minimum, at minimum, you're gonna have to bond that jacket to a ground when it comes into the building. Because if lightning gets on that cable outside, you want to make sure that you arrest that voltage as soon as it comes into the building and you safely dissipate it through the tele through the grounding electrode, which could be a ground rod, a ground ring, or anything like that. And the conductor that's attached to that usually comes into the entrance facility. Another reason is why you need to know where this entrance facility is located. And finally, another reason to know where the entrance facility is. You might be coordinating with the service provider or the access provider to do cutovers or maybe turn up new circuits. Right? They may you may have to identify where the entrance facility is for them, where on in that room that you want that equipment to land or or term the cables to terminate. Now, it is possible to have an entrance facility with multiple customers coming into it. I've seen it before, usually like at strip malls and stuff like that. Now, as I said, we have that 50-foot rule, and that 50-foot rule is not a standard thing for my people who get hung up on codes and standards and best practices. The 50-foot rule is actually in the codebook, which means you have to do it. So basically, what it says is when that cable comes into the building, within 50 feet, you have to transition from an unlisted cable over to a listed cable. Now, unlisted cable is a cable that cannot meet the NFPA standards for flame and smoke propagation. A listed cable can pass those standards. And the people who test it are NRTLs, nationally recognized testing laboratories. You might know them as UL, Intertech, UL of Canada. So one of those agencies have tested that cable, and if it meets the flame and smoke propagation characteristics that are allowed by the NFPA, then it's then it's called a listed cable. It's literally put on a list in the go book that you can read and say, Oh, I can put that cable in my building. So within 50 feet, you have to transition over to that listed cable. You see, unlisted cable has a black jacket and it's usually made out of polyethylene, and usually has this gel-like material inside of it called Icky Pick. Icky Pick is a petroleum-based product. It's also flammable. Ask me how I know. So within 50 feet, you've got to transition it over to a listed cable. There are some outside plant cables that are indoor outdoor rated in that scenario. You don't have to transition it. Now let me tell you this. The AHJ, the authority having jurisdiction, the electrical inspector, their opinions may vary by where you are doing your work. But the point is simple. Typically, you cannot just run outside plant cable throughout the building. So the entrance facility is where that transition happens. There is an exception that you might find sometimes where if it's in conduit, you might be able to go past it, and if it's an all-dielectric cable, and blah blah blah blah blah. Just make sure that you get the sign off from the AHJ that that cable's permitted to run beyond the 50-foot rule. Let's take a short break.

SPEAKER_00: 10:44

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SPEAKER_02: 11:30

So the last section we talked about the entrance facility. Now let's talk about the five major types of ways that you can connect to that entrance facility from the outside. And why one each how each one of those behaves in the rural world. You might even get asked to give your recommendations on which one to use. So it's good to know these. So make sure that you pay attention. Now, according to the the Bixie, it's a manual, the eighth edition says there are five types of ways that you can connect to the entrance facility. You can connect it through underground. You can connect it through buried, tunnel, aerial, or wireless. I'm only going to dive into the underground, the buried, and the wire and the aerial today. Tunnel, you know, in my 40 plus years in this industry, I've literally only run cable in tunnels twice. So it's not something you come across very often. And wireless is a whole different animal by itself. So I'm just going to focus on the most common, which will be underground, buried, and aerial. First, let's talk about underground cabling. Underground cabling, you're going to dig a trench, and then in that trench you will put a conduit inside that trench. And then you will backfill that trench up. And then you oh hopefully paid attention to my pro tip rules. I have a list of 147 pro tips on my website, and one of those pro tips is always leave a pull string. So always put a pull string in that conduit. So now you've got this case, this conduit buried underneath the ground. You can just attach your cable to the pull string and zip it right in. Here's the advantages to underground cabling. Number one, it preserves the building aesthetics because it's all underground. It typically might come up the outside of the wall on the building to a junction box and then turn and come in. Sometimes it'll come into the building below grade and then do the turn up. So it's very aesthetically pleasing. You don't see anything at all. It also gives you the best physical protection for the cable. You got protection from rodents because it's in that conduit. You got protection from that backhoe operator who always seems to dig up our stuff because they're going to hit that conduit, and that conduit's a lot stronger than that outside plant cable is. And it's going to minimize future repairs to the property because, again, it's encased in that conduit system. Or it might even might even be a duct bank system. It doesn't necessarily have to be a conduit system. And the beautiful thing about this is that that type of a system has a very long life cycle. You know, the average lifespan of a structured building is about 50 to 75 years. Average lifespan of a structured cable plant is about 7 to 10 years. Now that doesn't mean that cable can't last more than 10 years. But because of new computers, new systems, new processors, they're always needing faster and better cable. So we end up replacing them long before they actually ever go bad. Just to kind of prove my point, you might find a fax machine in a mechanic shop that's been operating there for 30 plus years. Because all they do on it is fax. Simply, I had to have a front alignment done on my pickup truck yesterday, so that's kind of stuck in my head, right? So it and it's going to cost the most to install out of all the other systems I'm going to mention today. But when you divide that cost out by the lifespan of the building, it becomes the cheapest. Again, especially if you follow that rule of always leaving a pull string. So here are the disadvantages for underground cabling. Again, the cable that's in the conduit or the duct bank system under the ground. You got to pay for the labor to install the cable, to install the conduit of the duct bank system. So it's got a really high initial cost. But again, like I said, if you if you amortize it over the lifespan of the building, it becomes the cheapest. Another issue, another disadvantage with underground cable, you have to route that cable carefully. You got to plan it out well in advance. You got to know where where are the shrubs going to be planted? Are there going to be trees? Where are the sidewalks? Where are the parking lots going to be placed? Because with outside plant conduit, you can't just make 90-degree turns. Or you can make a 90-degree turn, but it's not in your best interest. You need to plan them in advance so that way you can avoid those obstruct potential obstructions. Now, yeah, here you know, but Chuck, it's in a conduit, how's it going to obstruct it? You know, trees, when they grow, the root structure of the tree can be up to 35 to 50% larger than the canopy of the tree. So even though that tree might not be a sapling today, as it grows, the roots can go through the ground and they can, and I've seen this happen, they can get in the conduit system and block the conduit system. Another issue with underground cabling when it comes into the building, like I said, it can come up the side on the outside of the wall on the exterior to a junction box and turn and go in, or it might go below grade, come in. Wherever penetrates the building, it's always a great idea to seal that conduit. Now, a common practice is to use duct putty. Duct putty is actually designed to be used with HVAC systems, not necessarily conduit systems. So you're using a product for something that it's not listed for. Now, most AHJs probably aren't going to harass you over that, but you might want to really choose a product that's really designed to seal that outside plant cable coming in. So, for example, maybe go to Polywater and check out their product line. They've got stuff to seal outside plant cables coming into the building. Because you want to make sure that no rodents have a pathway to come in that building, no insects, no gases, uh, water, any of that kind of stuff. And again, all this adds to the installation time. And do me a favor, don't ever, ever ignore water intrusion because water has a way of finding its way in. And also make sure you understand what is the pulling tension is limited to your outside plant cable. Every cable is going to be a little bit different. The pulling tent maximum pulling tension for an outside plant copper cable might be different than the outside plant tension for an outside plant fiber optic cable. So make sure that you check with your manufacturer, find out what is the maximum pulling tension. I might even recommend that when you pull outside plant cable, that you use a Kellum's grip with a rated breakaway head. Now a Kellum's grip is just a wire mesh sock that kind of goes over the cable. When you pull one end on it, that wire mesh kind of comes down and bites onto the cable. You can also buy a head for it as well. So that way if you pull too hard on the cable, it breaks the head. It doesn't break that fiber optic cable that you've installed. Now let's talk about direct buried cable. See a lot of people confuse underground with direct buried. Direct bury means you dig a trench and you put the cable in the trench and then you backfill it. If this helps you remember the difference, direct buried cable actually touches the dirt. Underground cable does not. Underground cable is laying in a conduit. The conduit touches the dirt. Now, the advantages here is you don't have to pay for the material and the labor to install that underground conduit. So you are saving some money there. You're also getting the same benefit for underground cable is it helps preserve that building's appearance because it's under the ground, it's less likely to get damaged by wind loading, like hurricanes, ice loading for you guys up in the up in the northern hemisphere there, where you get snow and ice. I live in Florida, we don't get snow and ice here, but we certainly will get hurricanes, right? And the beautiful thing about doing direct buried cable is because it's just a cable laying in the ground, you can you can bypass obstacles easier once it's in the ground. You don't have to be you don't have to do that planning like you had to do with the underground systems. Now the the disadvantages here is if there's changes that are needed in the future, if you ran a cable between two buildings and the customer says, Well, we need uh we need another 200-pair cable, you're digging another trench. And by the way, you better know where that first cable is because if you dig over top of that first trench, you could accidentally dig up your cable. So you that that's the beautiful thing about the underground system is it's got the pull string and the conduit, it's easy to add on later on. Dreck buried, you're digging a new trench, right? It's also going to be harder to locate sometimes because um especially if you've got an all-dielectric fiber optic cable, which has nothing metal inside of it to find. Now, sometimes you will find they'll put tracer wires inside of them, which are detectable, and they even have tapes that you can put on the ground above the pipe, above the cable. So when they dig up the hole, they tear up that tape. The operator should stop and look to see what that tape says, and it'll say, Danger, danger, danger, Will Robinson, fiber off the cable below. Some of that tracer tape is also detectable by detection devices. Between the two, between the underground and the and this, the direct buried, this is going to provide you minimal amounts of physical protection. So make sure that you map and you document it because get the prints and actually draw where you actually laid that cable. And maybe save a backup copy of that because customers always tend to lose as-built documentations. So, a pro tip for you don't always expect that armor cable or that metallic warning tape, because some technicians don't do everything they're supposed to do. I hate to say that, but there are some out there. And don't trust that, well, I think it's over there. Always locate it first. Or call Miss Utilities, especially if it's a especially if it's a service provider cable. Have it located by Miss Utility. That is, let me back up. That is the first thing that you should always do is always contact Miss Utilities to make sure that that they identify where it is. Because if you dig up a cable that you didn't have properly identified by Miss Utility, you are now on the hook to repair that cable. Now they're not going to let you do it, they're going to do it themselves. And do you think they're going to give do you think they're going to do it as fast and as quick as possible, or do you think they're going to take their time and make lots of money? I'll let you ponder that one out. And also make sure you understand that, you know, how brittle gel-filled cables can actually get during the cold months. So if you're doing installations during October, November, December, January, February, especially in the upper upper areas, that cable does get brittle. It does get cold, and you may damage the cable during that install.

SPEAKER_00: 22:06

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SPEAKER_02: 22:50

Now the third cable is going to be the aerial entrance cable. Aerial cabling, when it comes out of the building, it hangs in the air and then goes to a telephone pole. Hangs in the air to get to the second telephone pole, and it does it over and over and over again until it gets to the final destination. Now the advantage with aerial cabling is it has the lowest installation cost of all those three types of cables I'm talking about today. And it's also extremely easy and accessible for maintenance because it's not buried in the ground. All you need is a bucket truck or a ladder with the hooks on the ends of it. So it's real easy to maintain it. Unlike the direct bury cable or the aerial cable, you may have to dig it up to find out what is going on. The disadvantages for aerial cabling is, let's just say it, let's put it out there. It's ugly. It is ugly. And as I mentioned earlier, it's susceptible to wind and ice loading. It's susceptible to falling limbs. Just last year, my Florida got hit by a hurricane and my neighbor was flooded out for two and a half months. We didn't have internet for literally almost that entire time because what happened was a tree, we were two and a half feet under the water, the root system was loose in the ground up. A tree came down on a on aerial cabling for the cable TV and knocked it out. So the falling limb took it out. And of course, they couldn't come in to fix it until the water subsided enough. So aerial cabling has those kinds of issues. They also have clearance issues. You gotta worry about what is the maximum height for a vehicle to come through here in a small neighborhood like mine, you know, Amazon trucks, maybe a delivery truck from Home Depot or Lowe's. But when you get into like an industrial environment, they might have big tractor trailers coming through there. So you gotta think about that extra distance you're gonna need to put to clear for that traffic. And because it's a comes into the building, it's attached to the building and it's attached to a with a lashing wire. The wind and the being bumped and being moved around can damage the exterior of that building. That's a disadvantage there. The key things to know about aerial cabling is again, know what bonding and grounding requirements are for the building and understanding strain relief and drip loops. Drip loops is a big one, a big one. And there's actually things in the code which talks about how an air cable should come into the building. So make sure that you read those sections in the code. I did mention the tunnels. I've done a couple projects where we had tunnel entrances, and it's just a tunnel that connects two buildings together. Um downtown DC, a lot of those buildings are connected together with steam tunnels. So in those kinds of environments, it's really easy to run cable because you don't have to worry about digging up streets. But because it's a steam building, you've got to worry about stainless steel attachments, stainless cable that's designed to be installed in an environment that has temperatures of you know 100 degrees, 130 degrees. You will you will often find tunnels in hospitals, military bases, universities, and some industrial complexes, and some industrial complexes as well. But the thing is, steam tunnels get hot, and don't we used to have to wear ice jackets, uh ice vests, not jackets, when working them. And we had to work we had to shift every 20 minutes, 20 minutes in, 20 minutes out. You couldn't just stay in there because the steam, and trust me, you did that steam, it can also disorient you as well, too. So make sure that you follow all the safety protocols and you have your safety tailgate sessions and you have an evacuation plan and the nearest hospital identified when working in the steam tunnels. But you see, it doesn't have to be a cable that connects to the entrance facility. You might have a wireless entrance, you might have a microwave link coming in or radio links entering into the building from the rooftop or the tower, and then those cables are routed from the antennas down the building, sometimes on the outside, sometimes on the inside, to the entrance facility. Again, binding and grounding, always important. Understand suede testing for doing coax terminations, and also weatherproof those outside connectors. That is a non-negotiable. So now that we talked about the different ways it can come in, let's talk about the different types of cable that you might find coming in. Okay, so copper and fiber are gonna be the two big ones, obviously. Copper is gonna be filled or dry blocked, it might have a steel armored or dielectric all around it, and for pair counts for as far as copper, you can get up to 2400 pairs and even larger sometimes. And those are gonna be some big cables to deal with. And you need to make sure that you know on those outside plant copper cables, you're gonna have dial tone coming in on them, pot circuits, you're gonna have alarms, you might even some old legacy phone systems. So think about separation of those systems between the binding groups of that large cable. Don't allow that cable to get kinked, respect the bend radiuses and make sure that you keep the outside plant copper the water integrity sealed. And especially with the outside plant cable, make sure that that water seal integrity is maintained, especially at the splice enclosures. Okay, now fiber, same thing. Fiber can come in lots of different variants. It can come in armored, typically referred to as loose tube fiber, because there's tubes inside of it and there's between six and twelve strands of fiber laying in there loosely, but you can get that with a tonable fiber optic cable with a metallic tracer, so it makes it easy to find. And it's obviously gonna be available in your multi-mode and your single mode, and pretty much whatever pair count you want it coming in. Keep in mind if you have a fiber optic cable coming into the building and there's a metallic component coming into the building with it, like a messenger strand for aerial cabling, or again that armor wrap for some other type of cabling, that's gotta be bonded to the ground as soon as it comes into the building. But you know, voice and data is not the only thing that you might find coming in the building. You might have cable TV coming into the building. So you might have some hardline coax feeders coming in, you might have some service provider broadband trunks coming in. Again, that that's a whole different show there by itself. And a lot of times that stuff's gonna be installed for you, you're just gonna be running to that and connect to it. But again, maintain those bend radiuses and also make sure that you keep everything fireproof or keep everything and make sure you keep everything waterproof. So by knowing what is the entrance facility, knowing the different types of cables that can come into that building and the different ways they can come in, it's gonna make you be able to troubleshoot that cable faster. It's gonna make sure that you know the pathways and keep you from stop guessing so you can get to the part of starting to diagnose the problem and fixing it quicker. When you know the limitations of both of aerial and buried and underground cable, you can ask better questions of the customer in the field so that way you can help recommend the correct method for them that's gonna last them the longest. When you know the types of outside plant cable, then you can stop breaking things that you're not supposed to touch. And most importantly, you become the technician that people can trust to handle the building's lifeline because that's what the entrance facility and the cables that connect to the entrance facility are. They are lifelines to the network and to the real world outside of that building. So I hope you learned something out of today's brief show. Do me a favor and leave a comment below if you did find something interesting in today's show or you learned something new. Until next time, remember, knowledge is power.

unknown: 30:07

Let's talk, let's talk, let's cable with ride.

SPEAKER_01: 30:13

In the world of ICT, let's ride this tide. Thank you for joining us on Let's Talk Cabling. Stay tuned for more episodes filled with innovation. Keep connecting, keep achieving until next time.