Let's Talk Cabling!

How ANSI And TR-42 Shape Reliable Cabling

Chuck Bowser, RCDD, TECH

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We sit down with outgoing TR-42 chair Henry Frank to unpack how standards are made, why contracts turn “voluntary” rules into must-do requirements, and what’s changing in cabling for extended reach, fiber polarity, and the 568 family. Clear takeaways for installers, designers, and owners on navigating codes, specs, and practical testing.

• codes vs standards vs specifications and how contracts make standards enforceable
• keeping references current and using “most current including addenda”
• what TR-42 covers across media, methods, and use cases
• consensus process, ballots, and public review
• consolidation of 568.0, 568.1, and 862 into one reference
• fiber polarity challenges for AI and high-density links
• extended reach over copper and the focus on field validation
• myths and marketing terms like Cat 6e and “industrial” categories
• why TIA does not use Cat 7 or 7A and how Cat 6A was right-sized
• design tradeoffs: room placement, channel limits, and real estate impact
• how to participate in TIA, ISO, and BICSI standards work

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Chuck Bowser RCDD TECH
#CBRCDD #RCDD

Opening And Listener Requests

SPEAKER_02

Hey water monkeys, welcome to another episode of Let's Talk Cabling. Today, we're not talking about rumors. We're not talking about market claims. We're talking about the documents that define how our industry builds cabling and networks correctly and efficiently. We're connecting at the human level so that we can connect the world. If you're watching this on YouTube, would you mind hitting the subscribe button and the bell button to be notified when new content is being produced? If you're listening to us on the 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 nights, 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, what are you doing? You know I do a live stream on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and anywhere else I can figure out to send the live stream to where you get to ask your favorite RCDD. You know I'm your favorite. Don't even try to pretend like I'm not. Your favorite RCDD. Questions on installation, design, career path questions. I answer all those questions. Whatever you, whatever you have.

SPEAKER_00

But I can hear my chuckle, drive my truck, it went so nice. It takes me out. I know when I get into an action.

Guest Intro And TR-42 Role

SPEAKER_02

Breathe in, breathe out. 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 buy me a cup of coffee. You can even schedule a 15-minute one-on-one call with me after hours, of course. And you can even buy Let's Talk Cabling Merchandise. So today, we're going straight to the source. You've heard this before, right? I've heard it, you've I've said this a million times, right? The best installers go beyond the code. They follow the standards, the best practices, and manufacture recommendations. They don't just follow the codes. Well, today, we're going straight to the source. My guest today is Henry Frank. He is the chair of the TR42 Telecommunications Cabling System Engineering Committee under Anzi. Henry, welcome to welcome back to the show because this is your second time on the show. Welcome back, my friend.

SPEAKER_01

It is. I'm waiting for my third time, so then I get the jacket. Wait a minute.

SPEAKER_02

I don't have a jacket yet. I've been on 300 episodes. What'd that tell you? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Um, and and actually a slight correction. Um, I'm actually uh very thankfully uh the outgoing chair of the standards committee. So uh I believe in giving back just like you do. So I spent my four years in leadership as the chair of uh of TIA uh TR 42 and just recently finished my last internal coordination meeting. So um, you know, we'll be welcoming them in uh Cindy Mondstream as the new incoming chair of TR 42, uh, which is great because as much as I love helping people build consensus, as you know, I've got a uh a voice that I like to share, uh, but that's not your role as chair. Your chair, your role is to encourage that healthy consensus building. And so I'm still gonna be involved with standards, uh, still love to talk to everybody about it, but now I'm gonna be a much more uh healthy contributor as just opposed to uh orchestrator, if you will. But thank you for having me on.

SPEAKER_02

Well, thank you for for leading the ANZ committee for I think it was four years, right? Four, four and a half years, something like that. Yes, sir. Four as chair and four as vice chair before that. Wow. That people don't realize the time commitment that that takes. And and I just want to say publicly, Henry, thank you for your dedication to this industry. Because it's people like you that give people like me something to talk about.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, you're welcome. I love having these conversations, so you know, really appreciate the opportunity.

Why Standards Matter For Installers

SPEAKER_02

Let's let's start right off. Okay, for someone who hears the ANSI standards, right? But they don't really know what that means. Can you tell us what is the ANSI standards and how do they affect the Joe Blow cable guy out there pulling cable?

SPEAKER_01

Yep. Um so for the installer specifically, it's gonna sound kind of weird, but it's not directly something that the installer has to read. What we want is that the specifications the um the for building the project. You have your overall project need, you have the specifications how to build it, you're gonna have your uh manufacturer's best practices um and manufacturer guidelines, you're gonna have industry best practices like Bixie, you're gonna have your industry standards and then your codes. They all work in a hierarchy. Um, and so what we want to ensure for the installer is that they're using standards approved methods of design, standards approved methods of installation and construction of their core materials. And it's really having that confidence that when they do the work that's described, they're gonna get the expected outcome. Um, and that's really what makes the the standards important is that they're not like a punch list. They're not something that uh is going to um you know take all these boxes off. What it's gonna do is provide the framework to make sure that the materials and the methods, the process, um and the design will work such that you know they're they're installing a they're they're installing the cabling system for a hospital or an A V system or a data center, and that when they're done, they're gonna have supreme confidence that it's gonna work as intended.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I I like I like that you said that the the install in a field does not have to read the standards. I like that you said that. And you're probably wondering, well, such was stuck saying that. Because I've read both the code book and the standards, and it's a lot easier to read the standards than it is to read the code book. A lot easier. And the the reason I like what you said that is because as long as the information that you're reading is current, for example, I don't know if Annixter still does this or not, but Annixter used to put out these little pamphlets, you know, one for each of the standards, and you can go through it, and it told you all the all the important things you needed to know as an installer in the field. And then also the same thing you mentioned best practice manuals, like the the Itza manual and the TDM manual. 99% of stuff referenced in that book is directly from the standards. So if you read those books, you are in fact reading the standards, you just don't realize it. You just don't realize it. So let me ask you this what makes the difference between the ANSI standards and the NEC?

Standards vs Codes And Contracts

SPEAKER_01

So natively, things like the NEC are codes, so they're enforceable by law. Theoretically, standards are voluntary, so you people will always make that nuance and say, hey, wait a minute, um, you know, I have to follow the NEC or else there's legal consequences from the authority having jurisdiction. But if if standards aren't a code, if standards aren't a law and they're voluntary, why do I care about following them? Absolutely fantastic question. They are voluntary, and so in my role as TIA chair or member of TIA, I'll say, hey, it's voluntary whether or not you adhere to them. But there's a catch in that. Chuck, have you ever done a cabling job where there isn't a contract involved in a specification? Very rarely. So um in that specification, in that scope of work, is always detailed, thou shalt, you know, you shall do something or you should do something. Shall is mandatory, should is optional. And it it will tell you, it's like you shall put in single mode fiber as per 568, you know, category 6a as per um uh 568, and a different version of it. So even though it is not a law per se, because it's in your contract, which is a legal document, because it's making a normative reference, you know, you shall follow Bixie or you shall follow TIA or any other document, like a manufacturer's guideline, then it is enforceable by law, and that's the part that gets overlooked. Right.

SPEAKER_02

Both sometimes you'll find in the contracts, you know, a lot of people miss the whole, the whole should, shall, may, and must thing. A lot of people miss that. And I and I've done I've talked about that before. But a lot of people miss, especially in the contracts, sometimes you will find the actual verbiage that says the work will meet and or exceed the current ANZ and Bixie best practices. Not contractually, you're obligated to follow that standard. But the problem is if you violate that, if you violate that, that's contractual law, not civil law. So just could just kind of compare and trust for a second. If you don't install a fire stop system correctly, you're violating the code. You could literally find yourself in court and maybe even jail or prison, especially if somebody got hurt or injured from that from that from lack of doing that action. But if you don't follow the standards, that's contractual law. Now, typically the tech out in the field is they're not gonna get the proverbial hands slapped, but the company will. The company's gonna, they're gonna get slapped by the judge, and the judge's gonna make them go back and put it incorrectly. And that's the other thing. I've got another scenario where standards no longer is voluntary. And I've come across this because, you know, because I teach a lot of contractors over the last 14 years. I actually did the math one time and and it's like 23,000, 24,000 people since I've been doing this. So I meet a lot of people in my and and and then all the Bixie conferences I go to, right? I meet a lot of people. I know some contractors out there that it is their standard operating procedure to install per the ANSI and the best practices, Bixie best practices. In that scenario, you have to follow it, even if you don't have a contract that says that.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, and and going back to what you said earlier, you talked about Wesco and Annixter and how they publish those handbooks, those are amazing resources. So just because I said, you know, the the technician doesn't have to read the standards, what I meant by that, and maybe I should have been more clear, is you don't need to carry all these binders with you. But I do encourage you to have access to the handbooks, access to it uh through a company resource, access it through um one of your partner organizations. Um I have that happen all the time. Somebody will say, Hey, I'm having a contractual issue where somebody says, I have to follow standard XYZ under clause one, two, three. Right. And can you can you help me navigate that? And you know, uh as a uh as their supplier partner, you know, I'm I'm glad to do that. And the larger organizations um will have that native uh capability.

Keeping Resources Current

SPEAKER_02

The thing that I will point out about following the the Angst or the West Coast guidelines, and again, they're not the only ones that do that, by the way. There's there's lots of them out there, but just make sure that whatever pamphlet you have is referencing the most current version of the standards. Because I've come across them before where they'd be like on the the B standards, and like, whoa, wait a minute. We haven't been in the B standards for quite a few years. Yeah, just make sure that whatever one you're reading, it does reference the most current version of the standards, which hey, that's a great question. What is the most current version of the standards?

SPEAKER_01

You know what? Uh it depends on the version. So if people and the way to find that out is you can go to whatever the standards body is. So if it's TIA standards and bulletins, you can go to the TIA website and find uh that out, or if it's ISO IEC for their standards, Bixie for their standards, they will have the um most current list. And what we normally do in TIA and ANSI, and as well as ISO IEC uh for their standards is we drop the revert revision number. So, for example, we are working on 568.f. So it's important for us to know which version we're working on. But when somebody specifies that uh for use in a specification, we generally recommend them um just say, hey, we we we we're referencing 568.1 and then put the note in there that all references are the most current, including all addenda, so that way things are caught. Um, and you're always keeping pace on technology. Then there's some weird exceptions that go uh through that. Like I remember when we started with Cat 6A cable many, many years ago and OM4 many, many years ago. There was some weird things where these standards weren't necessarily in sync. And so you'll list an exception and you'll list a dated reference. Um and that's only important when you want to manage the exception. So that's kind of what I recommend everybody do is leave off the version number and use the most current, but check with the standards making organization to make sure that you have the most current one.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and the standards are just like the NEC, they're just like the best practice manuals. The a company or even an individual can purchase a copy of the standards. I've got to say that I was showing them, you probably weren't looking at the screen, but I was actually showing my copy that I have here. Um, you can have a copy of the standards. It's not it's not like it's you know, um, you know, it's in Greek, so you know only a few people know how to read it. It it's anybody can buy the standards and read them. Um, they're not cheap, but they're worth having because it has helped solve a lot of arguments between me and people because somebody somebody will get taught something, and maybe they might get taught wrong, and they'll quote something, and I'm like, that's not right. It's this. Oh no, no, it's not. So then I'll do is I will literally crack open my standards and say, okay, on you know, 4.3.27, you know, page whatever, it says and I quote, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they'll come back and go, Oh, okay. Well, I did I guess I wasn't the most current version. So, because it contractually, it can cause you a lot of problems if you if you do the wrong thing, if you follow the wrong thing. So look, let me ask ask you this, Henry. What's TR42? What the heck's why is it 42? And what is the responsibility for that group when it comes to our world, structure cabling?

What TR-42 Covers

SPEAKER_01

So um, I don't even know what TR stands for. It goes back to hallowed antiquity, kind of like Bixie. Bixie used to have uh used to be an acronym. Um that we we you know, for those people like you and I that have a lot of gray hair will remember what the acronym meant, but now Bixie is just Bixie. So TR is just TR. It's it's it's the it's the numbering scheme for a committee, an engineering committee. And so there's different ones like there's TR48, uh sorry, TR8, TR14, TR41, TR42. They're different engineering committees that have a different scope. So there is uh microwave systems, there's towers, there's wireless. Um in our case, TR42 is for premises telecommunication systems. So the way it's organized is um sort of media, methods, and specific use cases. So the media is your fiber, your copper, uh, and by copper, there there's multiple medias now. Um you know, there's the the the four-paired balance twisted pair, uh, as well as things like um uh single-pair Ethernet, uh coaxial, all covered in uh the copper sections. There's the fiber sections on media, then there's the methods, which are um you know how you do generic cabling, how you do uh things like administration, bonding and grounding, pathways and spaces. Uh we have a whole subcommittee based on just terms and definitions to make sure that we're experts around the same table speaking the same language because otherwise it can get confusing. And then last but lot not least are the use cases, whether that's commercial offices, healthcare, data centers, things of that nature.

SPEAKER_02

Gotcha. So let me ask you this, because I I've wanted this myself. How are the standards actually written? I mean, how do they decide who gets put on the who gets part of the committee, and how they decide what gets put into it? You know, is it is it just they just throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks? How they figure out what gets put into the standards?

How Consensus Standards Are Written

SPEAKER_01

No, it's it's actually like you know that the that wheel that you have that you spin around in the country fair and you win a prize? We just put random stuff on there and uh and get it done. I actually wish it was that easy. Um it is a consensus process. So, you know, please ignore my levity because you know sometimes when you said you you just throw things at the wall, honestly, early on in some of the standards, that's what we do. We throw things on the wall because I all at least the way I manage my meetings, because it's about consensus, right? So you get a bunch of industry experts together and you have to agree on all the technical requirements. So what that means is you can't have a standard with a member company of the standards organization having a material technical disagreement. You have to do everything possible to resolve that. And that's you know, different organizations have different rules. So somebody that's managed by ANSI, it's it's very prescriptive of how you do that. So, you know, if if Henry doesn't want something in a standard or want something in a standard, they have to make every effort to do it, but it's not a matter of me stamping my foot or smashing my fist and getting things done. She has to make every reasonable effort. There's also a requirement for public input. That's the way ANSI uh does their their standard. So whether that's an ANSI standard written by TIA or an ANSI standard written by Bixie or an ANSI standard written by anybody else. And different organizations have different rules. So for example, ISO IEC, it's one vote per company, or sorry, per country. For TIA, it's one vote per company. And for other organizations uh like uh IEEE, it's one vote per individual. So that's something that a lot of people don't know about IEEE, is that it's individual contributors, not corporate or countries.

SPEAKER_02

So do they have representation from every facet of the industry? I mean, do they have contractors on it? Do they have consultants on it? Do they have manufacturers? My fear is if you get two manufacturers on a committee who's writing standards that people have to follow, they're gonna try to write their products into that standard.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. And that's and that's why you have to have that healthy contention, that push-pull contention. Um, so we have a number of uh systems integrators. Uh uh TIA, specifically TR42, yes, is heavily represented by uh manufacturers because there are dues associated with membership to actively participate. By actively participate is to make contributions, to make suggestions, um, and to have them weighed and included in the documents. Once we draft the documents, to become a standard, um, ANSI requires us to put it for public approval. Um uh so the the there's a guy that that we both know and love, John Adams, who taught me my OSP course, um and he's semi-retired, but an absolute wealth of information. Um so his public input is always welcome. And so when we talk, when we open up the OSP document, we have a process through TIA to get public input. And there's another person doing it right now with security, where they don't necessarily want to become a full TIA member, but they're very interested in a specific specific standard. So to get consensus, um to add things into the document outside of the public comment period, you have to be a member, you have your committee, you have to attend three meetings in a row before you can become quorum. So you might have a hundred members of TIA, um, which is probably a a good number for member organizations, um, and in your subcommittee, say it's commercial office building, you might have sixty or eighty companies, organizations, that contribute and attend regularly. To conduct business, you always require two thirds of that quorum of that 80 people, right? You have a hundred people total membership, eighty that participate all the time. In order to have a meeting, you have to have 60% of the people there.

SPEAKER_02

Oh no, they could be on a phone call too.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. So we have a combination of in-person and hybrid meetings or pure virtual. Um and we used to be all in-person, but then COVID forced us to go all virtual. So now we've been having hybrid. And up until the end of 2026, uh all the meetings will be hybrid, and they're deciding uh for 2027 if they're going to make some pure virtual, some pure in-person. Um but the the the I've what I've heard through the new leadership is that they're exploring options so that if we make an in-person requirement for one or two meetings, that it won't be onerous, that you won't lose your quorum membership, if that makes sense.

Timelines: From Idea To Publication

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So let me let me ask you a question. So our industry changes at the speed of light. That's one of the reasons I love this industry. What we were doing five years ago may not even be a valid installation process now, right? I mean, we're always changing. And that that that drives us as installers and techs in the field to always be constant learners, right? So from the time something is identified to need to be put in in the standard, when they do what's called call for interest, right? From the time that call for interest is done to the time they actually publish the standard. And I'm saying this because as I'm saying as I'm talking about as I'm thinking about the extended distance um one we're working on. We'll talk more about that later on. But you know, from the time that call of interest happens to the time that standard is published, are we talking about six months, two years? How how long is that process?

SPEAKER_01

So it can be as long as years. Um, so let's use the exam. So for ANSI, they they require you to either reaffirm, renew, or modify a standard every five years. And if there's reasons why you can't do it within five years, you can ask for an exception. There's nothing stopping you from going less than five years. There's been a number of cases where we've done less than five years and realize that a full-blown standard, a full-blown standard like brand new, might take a year or two to develop. So you might be talking a year, you know, a year or two in development, and then a five-year publishing standpoint, you know, if you're looking at something that was, for example, a 2021 standard, some of that information may be from 2019. And I don't want that to worry you because that's for a full-blown standard, and that's the life cycle. But if there's something important, and we'll use the example of, and I know we'll talk about it later, uh, with extended uh distance over balanced twisted pair. It was brought up as a study group two sessions ago. Last meeting, it was okay, you know, we we've got to write a bulletin. So a bulletin's slightly different from a standard, but we'll get into those nuances when we talk about that. That's going out for call for comments now. We'll be reviewing that in June. In June, it'll probably go out for an approval ballot if all goes well. And if the and if the group is if the group has done their homework, and I don't mean that in a denigrating way, if they've anticipated all the potential challenges and we can get through them in the call for comments in this section, and then in the approval ballot, uh uh recognize everything and and and get the wording right, we could actually publish it in a in a year uh by approving it for publication in the fall meetings.

SPEAKER_02

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01

So there are ways to make things done quickly, and if it's something that's not controversial, like for example, like say say for some reason we waved a magic wand and and we had a magic unicorn that could make whatever limitation doubled, and everybody agreed to it and it wasn't contentious. We could do it's we don't have to wait for the meetings. We can we can the this is the beauty of doing things remotely. We could have an administrative ballot to say, hey, here's this thing, and we want to do it, and we think it's gonna be not contentious at all, we want to make an addendum to one of the standards, and and it's a no-brainer. And it's like, okay, great. So that that would have to the administration part of the ballot could be done as as little as two weeks. And then we'd, if we had approval to work on it, we could work on it. It was something as simple as changing it to 2x. The only limiting factor is that uh uh ANSI requires us to have it open for a 45-day ballot uh to make it uh an ANSI approved document. So after that, we could again do it by email. So if you had this magic idea and we came up with it on the show today, um we could have it published through administrative purposes. If it was not contentious, we could have it um done in as little as two or three months. That's oh wow, the other side of the coin rarely happens because, as you know, technology isn't that simple.

SPEAKER_02

No, and we have a whole bunch of opinionated people in this industry too. So couple those two together. Not not a comp current company excluded from that, right? But there's you and I both know there's some very opinionated people in this industry, and it causes it causes problems all the time, right? So now that we understand TR42 and the committee, let's talk about. I saw a post, I think it was on LinkedIn. Don't hold me to that, and I think it was like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, maybe four weeks ago, because the time flies, it kind of blurs together sometimes. Um, you were attending one of the meetings. What came out of those recent meetings?

Fiber Polarity And AI Data Centers

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so we so we met uh the first week of February in uh it was supposed to be sunny Greenville, South Carolina, ended up being snowy Greenville, South Carolina. Um, and and there's a few things that are of interest to your audience. So, especially for the this whether it's the specifiers or the installers, we talked about the different specifications, and remember we had generic specifications. Well, this is how you generically do a cabling system. Now I'm gonna smash it, and this is how you're gonna do it for commercial, this is how you're gonna do it for industrial data centers, healthcare, whatever. And we had the 568.0 and 568.1 documents, and we had all this sort of generic wording, like you know, distributor A, B, and C, subsection, you know, uh cabling subsystem one, two, and three, and it got confusing for people. Um, so there's an effort underway to consolidate 568.0, which is generic, dot one, which is commercial, 862, which is building automation systems and smart buildings, and smash them all together into being one reference document. It's gonna be confusing um and it'll be an adjustment, but hopefully it'll make sense. And then we take it because that'll cover most of the world. And then we have the specialty stuff, whether it's residential or healthcare or data centers or industrial, and we'll manage those exceptions. So that's the first, that's the really big item. Um and I'm gonna do this in reverse order because I know you want to uh talk about this. Um so next I'll talk about so there's a lot of activity going on in data centers and polarity for fiber, you know, making sure transmit talks to receive. And now that we have single, you know, everybody was always looking at it as a duplex world where it was just two fibers, transmit to receive, that's fine. What do you do when it's eight? What do you do when it's 16? What do you do when it's one? What do you do when it's you know, you'll hear this thing called shuffles for AI, where it's theoretically eight fibers, four transmit and four receives in a channel. And so you have that repeated. So there's you know, one channel of eight hundred gig and another channel of eight hundred gig. But now instead of this channel and this channel being separate, what a shuffle is, you'll have this one talking to this one and this one talking to this one. It gets really complex, it gets really messed up, and you've got a lot of really smart people in there that are trying to figure out an eloquent way to do it, and they're they're trying to do that. There's also discussion about um AI uh data centers and how to do that. A lot of that work's being done in the international standards, and so we collaborate. TIA, Bixie, ISO, we collaborate, we share what we're doing, we we input into multiple places. Um for AI data centers, a lot of the work is being done in international right now, while the the TR42 committee catches up on that other work that I talked about, that that taking 568.0, 568.1, and 862 and smashing into one document, that takes up a lot of time. So they can't work on everything. The other big one, especially for your installers, and it's and the users, right? Because everything is about we talked about you know codes, standards, best practices, manufacturing guidelines, then your specifications, which is really is all covered by the umbrella of what does the customer need? What do they need to accomplish? And so a hot topic in our industry is extended reach, right?

SPEAKER_02

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

SPEAKER_01

And that is a very dismissive topic. And I don't think it should be. I I really don't. I think there's a lot of myths, misunderstandings, and I think it helps if we step back. So um uh, you know, sneak peek, we we we've got a document number. It's not ready to be published. It's TSB 5073, and it's going out for its first call for comments, which means it's only available to the committee members because we want to polish it. You know, you right, you know, like if you're driving putting your novel out there, your storyboard for your movie, you don't want to put the first draft out there for everybody to see, and they'll go, you know, they'd probably look at Star Wars and go, that's the stupidest idea ever. Who would ever want to do that? And they would kill it. Yep. But they bring it to the polish, and then it becomes this worldwide sensation. Um maybe a little bit of an over-exaggeration, but I'm kind of hoping that extended uh distance stuff and extended reach um will really be that sort of thing. So we're gonna create a TSB, it's going out for call for comments. By June, we'll be resolving that, and like I said, if all goes well, um, we'll put that out for an approval ballot, which means it could be approved as early as um this fall as a technical uh systems or technical services bulletin.

Extended Reach Over Copper

SPEAKER_02

Right. Well, that I'm glad to hear that because it's there there are certain ways you can start arguments between low voltage installers and designers, you know, pass-through versus traditional mod ends, right? Tire wraps versus Velcro. There's always, but now the latest one is extended distance cabling. You know, well, but I'm only I only got a camera that only needs 100 meg. Why can't I go beyond that 100 meters and and I'm glad we got at least some document to ref to reference now, right?

SPEAKER_01

Which is you know, and my only wish, so I I I was so a technical service bulletin is an informative document. It means you should do something. If you want to go over distance, you should do this. It's not prescriptive, thou shalt do this, which is what a standard is. I pushed for a normative document, which would have been an addendum to 568.3. Um uh but again, based on healthy consensus, everybody thought the best course of action was to become a TSB, which means it would be informative guidance. It doesn't stop it from becoming a standard later. So, for example, one of the other things I didn't talk about in that smashing of 568, uh, we're talking about taking the uh the wireless and DAS TSBs, which were informative, and making them normative. So, you know, if there's enough need for it, we can do it. And it's funny because you're right, I'll talk to people and they will get so up in arms about it that they can, you know, they can be best buddies, um, but you know, on the issue of extended reach, they can become the Hatfields and the McCoys.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Oh my gosh, on more than one occasion, I've seen good friends literally almost come fist of cuffs.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but but let me ask you this. Right? And and I I love to step back uh uh as and and this is what you know uh leadership in in standards has helped me is you can stand back and you can observe things to try and build that consensus. Um you design fiber and copper systems, right? Yeah, yeah. How far can you go with fiber?

SPEAKER_02

Single mode, you can go up to well almost 50 miles without having to be repeated. It depends on the bandwidth.

SPEAKER_01

Your application, you put good hard work into designing your fiber systems.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, there was there was an article uh came out a few months back. I think it was in Japan, they successfully transmitted 1.02 petabytes of data across 800 miles of single mode fiber.

SPEAKER_01

Right. So are you confident that you can deliver a signal over single mode over 100 meters, knowing what you know, Chuck? 100%. You can do it over a kilometer, right? 100%. You can do it over 10 kilometers if you have to with the right equipment and the right design and materials choices, right? And ban with the requirements, absolutely. Okay, and I'm gonna be absolutely sarcastic. So this is me dialing up my sarcasm button to 10 or 11. I'm gonna go up to 11 here. How come when it comes to copper, all that good intelligence and experience and expertise you have flies out the window when it's copper? It's like, oh my god, I can't do this anymore. Right. People will talk about physics and gauge size and everything else as it applies to copper, and that's very true. But it also the same physics, instead of electrons, it's photons on the fiber side. Um, so it's funny. I think we just got to wrap our head around it, and I think this is part of the challenge, you know. This is what I've observed over the years, is we've looked at standards too much of it's kind of like people that rely on AI. And it's just well, AI said it so, so therefore it's true, but really it's the knowledge, the context, the experience, the wisdom that we apply that makes these AI tools and these machine learning tools valuable. And it's the same thing here. Um, uh, Chuck, it it really is. Um, you know, we have to go more than 100 meters. And if we overrely on punch lists, you know, the reason we have a 100-meter limit for a channel and a 90 meter permanent link have nothing to do with photons or electrons or gauge sizes. Actually, technically it's gauge size of cable, but uh, and I think I've told this story to you before, but it's less to do about the capabilities of Ethernet or token ring or BACnet or any one of these low voltage applications you run them run on your twisted pair cabling. The history of the 90 meter limit is more to do with the way we designed our commercial office buildings back in the 80s when we came up with these guidelines and the typical floor plate of 25,000 square feet, having one electrical room per floor. And you know, you'd have one electrical room per floor because to deliver your 20 amp circuit uh over 120, uh you needed a 12-gauge cable, and that that dictated how big of a floor plate you could have per electrical room. And because it was an emerging industry, we put our equipment in electrical rooms, which means our 90-meter distance had more to do with voltage drop for AC systems than anything else. And it just sort of evolved for that. We've iterated.

SPEAKER_02

See, I I was told, I was, I was told that it was because of propagation delay. That was why we were stuck with that 150.

SPEAKER_01

That that that impacts jitter and that impacts delay skew, but you can it you can fix jitter and delay skew with a better design cable, better balance. That's why I always call it about balance twisted pair.

Field Testing And Variability

SPEAKER_02

True. And that's what I tell people all the time. And you know, as a general rule of thumb, you know, when you people, you know, I've been I've heard this probably for 40 plus years since I got in this industry. And you probably heard it once or twice too. Copper's dying, it's going away. And here we are, still installing copper, still installing it, and you know, now we're doing distance speeds that was once reserved only for fiber, and and we're able to do it cost copper.

SPEAKER_01

But the same thing with fiber. Remember when fiber first came on the market, you know, it was like, oh, it's the death of copper, and fiber can do anything you want. And now all of a sudden we're finding all these limitations on um uh insertion loss, return loss, cleanliness. Um uh you you have all these polarity issues with all these different schemata for things. And guess what's coming up? Because you've heard of holocore fiber and multi-core fiber. Yep. Guess what one of the biggest technical issues, and again, don't ask me, I can get you a PhD to interview. Um, all I know is one of the biggest technical issues besides orienting the strands of fiber to make sure if I'm supposed to talk this way, I'm not this way. You know, I've got to make sure that that is there. But now having multiple cores in the same glass, guess what? One of the number one criteria is that you have to overcome optical crosstalk. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02

I never even thought about that.

SPEAKER_01

You're and if you want, I'll find you a real expert that can explain it much better than I.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that sounds like a good future. But let me ask you this before you before you reach out to that person, because one you and I talked about this in a separate conversation before. Sometimes PhDs and engineers don't make the best guests.

Myths, Marketing, And Naming

SPEAKER_01

Oh, and that that that's why we've got to find you the best one. So, all this to be said is people are afraid, and so I see it in the committee, and I'm not gonna name names of who's in the in the copper committee, but people are saying, you know, there's a lot of variability between the transceivers and the thighs. So I think I could do this uh instead of 100 views, I think I can do 130 or 150 or 200 or 2000. I don't care what the number is. I think I can do this, and you'll see a lot of people rightfully putting in some caution about the variability of those transceivers and saying, you know, hey, maybe the best way is to do a field test. And I always recommend a field test. And by a field test, I mean proper bit error rate testing, not just a ping test. Do I get a link like a qualification test? I can hear you. I may not understand anything you say, but I can hear you. That's kind of a ping test. Um, so they're all worried about that, and that's why they didn't want that. Was the argument for not making it normative. So I uh uh I backed off. It's just like, okay, I hear you.

SPEAKER_02

And that's it. That's one of the things I really loved about the whole game changer cable thing. You know, people love them, people hate them. You know, there's two distinct camps when it comes to game changer cable. But the thing that I love about that conversation is it got us thinking outside the box. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

That's why I like that's what I loved about that, the whole conversation. Always make a rule and you always make the exceptions, and I embrace that. But you have to do it with your eyes wide open, and so the people that are overly fear-mongering, I think they're rightful to to be fear, fearful. And the people that are saying, Oh my god, there's nothing wrong with it, um, I also agree with. I think there's nothing wrong with budding rules. But the people that tend to be extremists on either one of those camps, I think if we can bring them together, um, we can do this because we do this every day with fiber, we do this every day with copper. So the 100 meter limit, you know, arguably, and the same thing with four connectors. You're allowed 100 meters, four connectors. It doesn't mean that that three connectors is good, five connectors bad. It just means you better be able to support at least four. There's use cases where I've shown where you you need five, six, seven. I I've seen use cases where they've need ten concatenated connectors in a copper channel over a hundred meters, and everybody's low on their minds. It's like, oh my god, you're breaking standards. It's like, no, I'm not breaking them, I'm exceeding them.

SPEAKER_02

Right, and that's where that's where the whole conversation is understanding the customer requirements kind of trumps sometimes what the standards say. Because again, I'll I'll go back to the to the the extended reach stuff, right? Because the you know, when when when that company came out with their extended reach cabling, it was it was marketed for people putting in cameras way out in the left field, right? And that camera's only using 100 meg. Well, we can we can do we can do 10, well, we can do 40, well, 40 gig to 98 feet, but we can do 10 gig 10 gig to 100 meters, but if you understand 100 meg of that, you can go further distances. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and and and and remember, you know, these networks now step down like from 10 to 5 to 2.5 to 1. Depending on the the the transceiver. From 10 to 10, from one to a hundred to ten meg, right? And so everybody has a different requirement. And You know, i i it embrace that because too often the standards have been written around like so you you you you're an R C D D, I'm an R C D D. Oh my god, your your telecom rooms shall be in the center of the building and they shall be stacked. Because oh cabling is the center of the universe. Everybody else revolves around me. Um, I'll tell you from personal experience, I love to celebrate failures. I'll give you one of my biggest failures. I did that in an airport where I put enough telecom rooms in there to make sure everything was under a 90-meter permanent link, everything was stacked. And thank God the the electrical, architectural, and mechanical engineers and architects um liked me because I was on the 30th floor of the building when I proposed my design, and I think they were, you know, if I'd really pushed it, they would have thrown me out the window. Because an airport doesn't care about telecoms. No, they care about moving airplanes, bags, and people in that order. Airplanes can't crash, bags gotta get there, people gotta get there too. They don't really care about the people because if you miss the flight, they're gonna charge you extra, or they'll put a Starbucks up in the way while you're being delayed and you're gonna be happy.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and and say a$25 cup of coffee, it's really worth it.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. But you don't tell an airport that, hey, because this again, it's celebrating my failures, and it if Al Lyons ever listens to your um podcast, he'll laugh because he'll remember trying to talk me out of it and giving me the hard lesson. You do not stack telecom rooms in an airport and tell the baggage handling people you'll just have to move the baggage handling line. Yeah, that's that would that did not go over well. Imagine that. So back to length. So if you think about it, what what's you know, you you you have your airport terminal, and then coming off every airport terminal at every gate is a jet bridge. And they're variable in length, right? And they can be 50 meters long, some of them for some of the big airplanes, and what do you have at the end? You have a remote control to control that jetway bridge, and you have uh a phone and maybe a terminal and maybe some sensors. So if I'm gonna be hampered or not hampered, if I'm gonna be limited to that 90-meter permanent length, and my jet bridge is 50 meters long, and I'm 50 meters between jet bridges, guess what? I need a telecom room and jet bridge.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_01

And that's exactly what I designed, being the good newly minted RCD, and there's nothing, and I'm not denigrating the RCDD. That that was the best decision I ever made. But I didn't put the context in to look at it from the customer perspective. Right. So for a hundred gate airport, I had a hundred gates just a hundred telecom rooms just for the gates, plus the other 50 for the building. It's like this is ridiculous. Some of your telecom rooms only have five or six cables.

SPEAKER_02

And real estate comes at a premium, especially in in airports. Let me ask you this, because there's a you know, I always get com I always get questions about what I call fake terms, right? Chuck, what about cat 6e? What about cat 5 Little E versus Cat 5 Big E? Or Chuck, what about future-rated cables? How does the standard address that misinformation or those non-standard things?

Design Tradeoffs And Real-World Constraints

SPEAKER_01

So awesome feedback, we get that a lot, and so people say, well, how come standards doesn't call out things you can't do? So there is no 5 capital E, 5E is always lowercase, 6A is always uppercase. There is no such thing as a 6E or a 5 big E. There's no such thing as a 5I or a 6I, something you didn't mention, but I've heard mentioned because it's oh, it's industrial. Um so what you this so this is where it's important to pay attention to those handbooks, pay attention to what's going into standards. The rest of it's marketing. And so, although I don't mind the idea of marketing that, hey, this is I because it's specially designed to go in an industrial environment, right? But you shouldn't call it a 5i or a 6i. Same thing with a 6E versus a 6A. Um, you know, the dirty little secret of 6A is 6A is 6A because no one could agree to what to call it. So there was a TIA meeting where there was a happy hour and everybody gave up their ideas, and it was just like I want six, like literally it was cat seven. Oh, we can't have it cat seven because IEEE's got okay. Let's call it cat eight. Well we can't call it cat eight because it's not it's it's not better than cat seven. Okay, well, maybe we should change it from A's to B's and let's call it 6E and 6X and let's get rid of the nomenclature. And really, what it came down to was they argued themselves out because I was in that meeting, yeah, and it was free beer and a popcorn that I was gladly eating because I wasn't working for a manufacturer at the time, I was working for a systems integrator, and I'm eating popcorn, watching this go on and getting these people all upset. So 6A is people say it means augmented, and really that comes around the TSB. So it's like, hey, if you want to go beyond Kit Kat 6, you have to augment the performance. Right. So that's where the 6A came from.

SPEAKER_02

It's funny that you say that because um while I've never well, I can't say I have participated in the stage when I used to work for Engels McCoy. I I was the representative for HM on the TI for short period of time. But uh but I've I spent a lot of time on Bixie committees helping write the the best practice manuals and stuff, and and some of the argument, you're right, it's like just get the popcorn, it's it's a show. And I and I've heard I've heard that the the the acronym TBBIBC, which is a really old acronym, it's not one that's even used anymore, T B B I B C Telecommunications, bonding, backbone, interconnecting, bonding conductor, was was, and I can neither confirm nor deny this, but I heard that they coined that at a happy hour because they couldn't come up with a good name for it.

SPEAKER_01

Well, and and this is the consensus. And you know what, as much as it's a funny, it's an anecdotal story, it's a encouragement to join, because it's a lot of fun, despite the fact that we're all nerds. Right. But B, it gives you more understanding of what goes into the standards and what doesn't get into the standards and about the the the consensus. So when you have to make these intelligent decisions, it gives you the ammunition to talk about it. And more importantly, it's like, you know, really when we want to get down to it, you know, is it six little a, big a, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you really want the the the standards guys focusing on the the the naming and the nomenclature? I don't want them spending any time on that like that. And when I was chair, I tried to focus on what is meaningful outcomes uh for people. And that was the same discussion back to your original question. Why don't we specify what you can't do? Well, you can't go and you know um pull the cable with a pair of vice grips. You know, you can't you you you you you you can't take an indoor cable and push it through a c a conduit by putting a fire hose onto it and pushing it with water. Well, you couldn't.

SPEAKER_02

I'm using no way in the world. You can come up with every scenario that they could come across in the field. There's no way. Let me ask you this question. This is something I've always pondered. Sure. And I think I know the answer, but I don't know for a fact. You probably know the answer better than I do. Why does the ANSI standards skip from 6A to A? And when there's the ISO is 7 and 7a. Why do we not have a 77A NRC?

SPEAKER_01

Because ISO copyrighted seven, and this is why we went from 6 to 6a. So 6 and 5 to 5e was an iteration. It was an improvement on, you know, uh sorry, I gotta do it this way. Um, signal degrades, noise comes up, right? And so the original 5e at 100 megahertz, signal met noise, which means it really wasn't distinguishable. So hopefully I'm showing this the right way in the camera. You had to shift it. That was 5e to take your 100, so when signal met noise, it was beyond 100 megahertz, and that was 5e, so that's why it was an iteration. 6 to 6a was a generational 250 to 6 or 250 to 500 megahertz.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

How To Get Involved In Standards

SPEAKER_01

Um 7 was developed before 6a. Okay. And they said, hey, we know that they're gonna go beyond a gig, so we need to develop something. So they developed something. That's by the original 7 requirements, uh, because it was completely new exploratory technology and there was no application written for it. They came up with the the uh parameters that they did. Sick uh TIA took a more measured approach, waited until IEEE said, hey, this is how we're gonna make the transceivers, and then figured out, oh, well, I can make that instead of you know a 600 uh or 625, I forget what seven the original seven was. We could do that with a 500 megahertz cable with these parameters. So um even though cat seven is higher than cat 6a from a number perspective, and you assume from a hierarchical perspective, and definitely from a specified bandwidth, not an X-roll bandwidth, but a specified bandwidth, it is higher. It's actually an older cable than 6A. 6A was uh I like to call it right-sized for 10 gig applications, and so because ISO had copyrighted the term cat 7 and it was tied to that performance level, and cat 6a, even though it was newer and written for the application, it didn't mean it, so you couldn't call it cat 7. Okay, and then you couldn't call it cat 8 because it would imply the wrong thing, and that's what caused that whole hullabaloo about what the heck to call it.

SPEAKER_02

Because I get asked that question a lot. Why is it not 7 or 7a in the in the end? I get asked that question quite often, and now that makes sense because cat's I think cat 7 now is 600 megahertz, and I think cat 7a is 1000 megahertz.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it gets it gets weird with all of these things because now that you're going to you know uh 1.4 gigabit or or whatever, and you have you know 30 limits, you know, whatever, like and there was a category eight within TIA, right? Um and and I forget what it gave you, but you know, category eight, for example, is a paper tiger. I've never seen it implemented in the field. I've seen it right.

SPEAKER_02

No, I same here. I mean it's it's out there, it's in the standards. We can do 40 gig up to is it 30 meters, I think. Yeah, which is 98.4 feet or something like that. You know, it's really I think it's really more designed for data centers than it is more for commercial office cabling. But the funny thing is, is again, you you know, you put people on the internet and they all of a sudden become uh subject matter experts and stuff they know nothing about, and you'll see, well, I'm getting Cat A cable from my home network.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I need Cat A. Or and this is the the this is the danger, and this is where your technicians and your contractors have to be careful. Sometimes they're bidding on things like it used to be popular, um, where people would say, Hey, I want you to install the highest graded category cable available at the time. And that's like, whoa! Right, time out, you know. Look at the whole picture, look at the whole picture, not just danger, Will Robinson, danger. Like, don't say like I had a hospital say that it says, No, you know, um, you have to put in category eight. It's like, okay, I'll put in category eight for you. You're gonna hold me, and and I worked for a very large systems integrator at the time, you're gonna hold me responsible for category eight. That's fine. You're gonna make me eat the the millions of dollars. I worked for big integrator, it would hurt, but yes, we'd absolutely absorb it. But do you realize what you've now done? They said, Well, what do you what do you mean? What have I done? I'm holding you to your contract. It's like, well, wait. We worked on a hundred meter channel with a 90-meter permanent link. Now you want me to put in category eight, which means I'm not gonna have a 100-meter channel, I'm gonna have a 30-meter channel, right? And because a typical hospital is about four meters up and down, that's about uh you know an effective 20-meter permanent link. And so just by rough numbers, um, you're gonna need about 20 times more telecommunications rooms. So fine, you're gonna make me eat the category eight, you're gonna make me install it, I'll do it. But in order for you to do that, you've now got to change your pathway design in your rooms and give me 20 times more telecom rooms in the facility. And you got to give up floor space and customers, hey, and then all of a sudden say, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, maybe I don't want that.

Time Commitment And Career Upside

SPEAKER_02

It's like that's what I tried to tell you. Right, right. So we're running short on time, so let's go ahead and shift into the last section. You know, here's the big question, right? Our industry doesn't stand still, neither do the standards, right? So the technology, you know, it it definitely doesn't stay still with us, and that always drives us kicking and screaming to the future. So the the person who might be listening to this podcast episode, or they might come across us and ask about it, how do they how can they get involved with this? How can they get involved with Anzi? Do you have to be an RCDD?

SPEAKER_01

Do you have to have 40 years of experience? Nope. Uh one one of the people I most recommend in the industry and will remain nameless, um started working in um in a consulting engineering firm by happenstance, but was very interested in standards, so they attended the meetings and uh represented their organization and their firm quite well, and have become one of the preeminent subject matter experts. You know, I started with standards, oh god, in the last century, uh, because I heard industrial automation, industrial Ethernet was coming, and the standards guys are working on it, and I just showed up. So reach out to whatever standards body it is, right? So like Cindy's in charge of of uh uh TIA. Reach out to her, she'll introduce you to the people at TIA. You've got guys like Pat Mahoney who's who's chair of the Bixie Initiative. Reach out to him, he'll introduce you the right people. Uh, there's Brian Salela of Siemen, who is uh the U.S. tag representative. Remember, it's one vote per country into the international ISO standards. So he he's the head of the U.S. tag. He can tell you how how to participate that way. Volunteers are welcome, but you got to be committed. So typically, for example, for leadership in TIA, just to attend, you can attend once you get through your membership thing. But once you get into leadership, they ask for a letter of support from your organization, and I encourage people to support. You know, there's an absolutely brilliant guy, Bob Faber, who works for DLB Accenture now, um, who's participating in the city. He's been bought for many years. Yeah. And so now he's participating in TIA and he and he's participating in leadership. So leadership is included. So you can go to any one of those websites, but you know, I name drop, you know, either Cindy or Pat or Brian's or you know, reach out to myself or or or you, Chuck, and we can point them in the right way. Because it you don't have to be a subject matter expert on how to like I don't know how to make a category 6A cable. I work for a vendor, but don't ask me how we make our fiber, don't ask me how we make our copper. I have no clue. I'm a premise guy, I'm a design guy. I'm an installate, like I cut my teeth being an installer, right? So now I go and help with design and I help with owners to make the right decision. So I'm like a an advisor for a decision-making criteria. Doesn't mean I can't participate in standards because you can look at things as like that makes sense or that doesn't make sense, and you can help steer the the the direction because by the same token, when you see these guys with multiple P these people with multiple PhDs that are designing the fibers, they're designing the copper cables, they've never pulled a cable never, never pulled cable day in their lives, and they don't understand people that have never stepped foot in a data center, but you have right. You've built a hospital, you've built an airport.

SPEAKER_02

So if someone does join, um can they join as an individual? That's my first question. And um, if not, if if what is the what is the time commit on a monthly basis? How many hours as a volunteer, not necessarily in leadership, but as as a volunteer, how many hours a month do you think that uh ANSI is gonna expect them to participate?

Closing Thanks And Takeaways

SPEAKER_01

So it's not ANSI is the accreditation body for TIA. So TIA meets three times a year. Typical meetings are about four hours apiece. You'll probably have uh, because you and I were talking about you know investments when you when you do this. So if you look at your four-hour meeting time um, you know, per meeting, per subcommittee, right? But they meet for the whole week. So if you're involved, if you if you're a systems integrator or a person that wants to be involved with everything and you're meeting for 40 hours that week, expect a four X investment outside of those meetings. But if you want to just participate, for example, in extended reach, that's about a four-hour meeting. So expect your four-hour meeting three times a year and probably a four X investment uh outside of that to review the documents, to review the contributions, and decide how you want to do that. And it's not all it it's not all the standards taking. The standards give so much back to you. Um because Bixie committees, same thing. If you participate in Bixie, you participate in TIA, like please do, because it's not just about the things you need. You can read the book to find out what's in the TDM app, you can read 568 to find out what's in it. But what engagement gives you is participation and it gives you the relationships. It's like I don't there's more things, far more things that I don't know than I do. But what I do know is I know I know who to call, not necessarily to get to the answer, but to get closer to the answer and closer to the answer and closer to the answer every single time.

SPEAKER_02

And one of one of the biggest advantages I came across when I was on the the TIA committee meetings when I worked for HM was your name gets put in the book. And when you're bidding things and it says the work has to meet or exceed the the Anzi standards or has to meet or exceed the Bixie best practices, who's gonna be more knowledgeable about what's in that than the person who's actually on the committee that helps write that? And here's another thing: if you if you're if you're out there all complaining about the standards always running behind what we're doing or the standards has it wrong, take a seat at the table. Exactly the industry. That's the key. Exactly. Thank you for Henry. We're right up against our mark here. We got we had some questions we didn't cover, but I have a feeling this is probably gonna be broken into two different episodes because lots of great information. And I know I'm gonna get lots of comments about this. So I appreciate you coming on, and I appreciate everything that you do for the industry because people don't realize the time, the energy, and the effort that goes into not only just participating in standards, but like you leading it for eight years, four years under two different uh committee, subcommittee chair and then the committee chair. Um, that's a lot. And I appreciate you pulling back the curtain so some now people can understand why is there not Cat 7 or Cat 7A in the standards?

SPEAKER_01

Well, glad to help anytime. Thank you, Chuck. Love the platform, man.

SPEAKER_02

I appreciate you. Till next time remember knowledge is power. Yes, sir.

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