Stop Playing Cable Detective

We get real about why bad labels turn simple service calls into expensive downtime and frustration for techs and customers. We define telecommunications administration, break down how it scales from a small office to enterprise sites, and share practical labeling rules that hold up years later.
• why messy telecom room labels force “detective work”
• what telecommunications administration means beyond paperwork
• how ANSI standards and the BICSI TDMM guide consistent labeling and records
• the operational payoff: faster MACs, less downtime, better capacity planning
• the four administration classes and what complexity changes
• when Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) starts to fit
• why machine-printed labels beat Sharpie for finished work
• examples of labels that “tell a story” from outlet to rack and port
• why labeling by room number breaks over time
• how color coding helps but cannot replace documentation
• best practices: label both ends with the same ID and keep it consistent
• why documentation, drawings, and rack elevations complete the system

If this episode helped you understand telecom administration just a little bit better, would you just share it with another wire monkey to try to help that level up this industry?

Transcript

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Welcome And Quick Housekeeping

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey Why Monkeys, welcome to another episode of Where to Star Key Link. So this week we're talking about labeling. If you're watching this show on YouTube, would you mind hitting the subscribe button and the bell button to be notified when new content is being created? If you're watching us on one of the listen to 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 nights, 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, what are you doing? You know I do a live stream where you get to ask your favorite, you know that's me, your favorite RCDD, questions on installation, design, certification, career path, credentialing, anything, anything at all. But I can hear it, but Chuck I'm cracking my third race. Relax. 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 mind clicking on that QR code right there? You can schedule a 15-minute one-on-one call with me after hours, of course. You can even buy Let's Talk Cabling Merchandise. So I labeled tonight's show, label it like you mean it, why telecommunications administration matters. And this this is really one of those subjects that people tend to either get it or don't get it. So we're gonna talk about why it's important and what you need to know about

Fiber, AI, And NEC News

SPEAKER_01 2:11

labeling. But first, we gotta break into the wire monkey weekly news, Ict news, and something I just ordered for you recently a few weeks ago. First off, this week the fiber world is descending on Orlando, Florida, my hometown. And of course, I'm not a town. As if if you can't tell, I'm not in my home studio, so I'm not in Florida this week. But this week, Fiber Connect 2026. It's one of the largest fiber broadband events in North America. It's going to bring together more than 5,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors, and hundreds of speakers at the Gay Lord Palms, the same hotel that Bixie uses sometimes. So if you go to Bixie conferences, you should be used to the Gaylord Palms. The big thing this year for that Fiber Connect is AI-driven infrastructure, high-density fiber networks, broadband expansion, and the growing need for fiber to support everything from smart communities to edge computing to agriculture. The translation for the Wire Monkeys here is fiber is no longer just telecom infrastructure, it's becoming the backbone for AI, the backbone for data centers, the backbone for automation, and pretty much every connected system moving forward. Also in the news, AI, because kind of tied in with the first story, AI is consuming fiber faster than manufacturers can make it. AI data centers are creating a fiber optic land rush, and manufacturers are struggling to keep up. A recent report says that hyperscale AI facilities are consuming massive amounts of fiber infrastructure due to the insane bandwidth requirements between servers, storage, and GPUs. Industry analysts warned that the demand is now outpacing the manufacturing capacity in some sectors, especially fiber in the high density or specialty fiber solutions. For the ICT industry, this means longer lead times, rising costs, and more pressure on contractors and designers to plan their projects earlier. The translation for my wire monkeys is AI is not just changing software, it's physically changing the cabling industry. Also, states are starting to push back on licensing in the NEC confusion. A growing debate happening around the new NEC language and how low voltage work is regulated across different states. A recent discussion out of Delaware highlighted the confusion and the pushback surrounding the proposed licensing and classification changes tied to the communications and limited energy systems. Some contractors and technicians are concerned that the changing NEC structure could blur the line between electrical and ICT work, potentially leading to stricter licensing requirements or even jurisdiction battles. The big takeaway here is the industry may be entering a period where understanding both electrical code and structured cabling standards becomes even more important. In other words, the days of I'll just pull cable are fading fast. By the way, links to all those stories will be in the thing below. So as I said, I am not I am the I'm in my courtyard studio today. I am obviously not in my home studio, probably won't be back for another week or two dealing with some family issues. If you're a friend with me on Facebook, you know what's happening in that life, and I'm not going to dive into it

The Telecom Room Labeling Nightmare

SPEAKER_01 5:17

here. But let's talk about I'm gonna I want to paint a picture for you. Let's say that you walk into a telecom, and I guarantee you most of you be most of you technicians can relate to this. So you walk into a telecom room and there's 14 patch panels, and half of the labels are handwritten, three of the cables say data, one of them says do not remove with no date on it. And the PM is asking you, well, which cable's feeding accounting? Everybody suddenly wants to become a detective. Well, guess what, WireMonkeys? This is exactly why telecommunications administration matters. So there's a lot of stuff out there for us. There's the Anzi standards for for for administration, there's the Bixie T DMM that talks about administration, but it's only going to be good if you use it and if people understand it. You know, a lot of technicians, when they hear the word administration, they immediately think, oh my gosh, paperwork. And most technicians are horrible at paperwork. The ones that are good at paperwork become project managers. But telecommunications administration is not just paperwork, it's labeling everything, documenting everything, it's identifiers, it's records, it's pathways, it's even colors. It's also knowing what goes where and making sure that the make sure the future you does not hate the past you. Because trust me, tell me in the comments below if you've ever done something in the in the in the heat of the moment because you just wanted to get out of that job site for today because it was a Friday afternoon, and you had to come back two weeks later and you were hating yourself for what you did two weeks ago. Tell me in the comments below if if that describes something that you did, or is it just me, right? So let's talk about a simple definition. Telecommunications administration. What exactly is it? It's a system that's used to identify, label, track, and document the ICT infrastructure. This includes everything from the telecom room to the equipment room to the patch panels to the cables, backbone cabling, fire stopping, yes, even the fire stopping, the bottom and grounding system, and even the pathways. Basically, if it exists in the cable system, somebody should be able to identify where it goes to, where it comes from, and even what it contains. So if you ever had to troubleshoot a cable and then come to realize that the label means makes absolutely no sense, for example, maybe the cable is labeled A, or maybe it was labeled PP1 for patch panel one. Well, which port? Or by room numbers. You know that I hate labeling by room numbers. Or here's a better better one: labeled differently on both ends of the cable. And another good one too is Sharpies fading after two summers in a warehouse, or sharpies that have been rubbed off from them from the pulling process. That's not administration, that is an archaeological research. That is becoming a detective and figure out what goes where. So why does labeling actually matter? Again, I highly suggest that if you want to be really good at labeling, and this this shows only a cursory touch into labeling. If you really want to get good with labeling and do it correctly, make sure you read the ANSI standards. Make sure you read the the Bixie TDMM, the administration chapter, because there's a lot of great information in there that tells you how to label everything. And if everybody just followed them, I know they're voluntary, so don't get on me chuck. Standards are voluntary. I get that, I get that. But if everybody followed them, it would make your job easier because you don't necessarily always go behind yourself. You're sometimes going behind somebody else. And if that somebody else didn't label it correctly, that's gonna cause you headaches, not that person who labeled it. And here's why it matters operationally. The TMM explains that good administration simplifies moves, ads, and changes, right? Because if you know where that cable's going, you know exactly where it's terminated, you can fix it, you can get it up and running, that's gonna save you time and headache. It's also gonna save the customer time and headaches. It's gonna make you quicker troubleshooting, it's gonna help reduce downtime. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize this, but when a cable goes down, if it's labeled incorrectly, you have to play, again, like I said earlier, detective to figure out where that cable goes. That's gonna take time. And while you're taking time doing this, the person who's supposed to be using that phone or that computer to make to make money for the company can't do that. So the customer's taking a double hit. Also, when you do administration correctly, it's gonna help for um capacity planning because you can actually figure out how much bandwidth you need to have on those backwind cables if you have everything labeled correctly. It's gonna improve the maintenance, it's also gonna support future growth. I know people hate that term future growth, future growth, future growth. But the best technicians care about future growth because they understand life is not stagnant, it's not a book, it's not black and white. Customers always add on, customers always move, things go down. I've had people even tell try to tell me in the past that you know, when when you punch a cable on a patch panel, it never goes bad. Uh things happen, things absolutely happen. So be prepared for that. So future proving. The simple translation here is good label is gonna save you time, your energy, it's gonna save you from headaches, and it's gonna save the custom the customer labor, and it's also gonna help improve your sanity. Let me ask you a question: would you rather spend five minutes fixing a problem or three hours trying to identify the right cable? Right? The difference? Administration. Because you may not even go into the right telecom room, might even go into the right patch panel. And I've even tried troubleshoot cables before where the cable was one color coming out of the wall, but a different color at the patch panel because somewhere in the middle it was spliced. Tell me if you've ever had that before. The best technicians aren't just installers, they're information managers. Anybody can pull a cable, anybody can pull a cable. Professionals create systems that the customer can understand for years later, that the future technicians coming behind you can understand it for years later.

Four Administration Classes That Scale

SPEAKER_01 11:22

So the TMM breaks administration down into four classifications: class one, class two, class three, and finally class four. And depending on which classification you fall under, it's gonna tell you which components you actually have to label. This is one of the easiest ways to explain the system that's gonna be that a lot of people seem to think are complex. First one, class one. That's a single equipment room environment. Think of a small office, like a like a veterinary office, that they only have one telecom room, right? Simple infrastructure, minimal minimal administration is going to be required. Everything's all coming back to one central point. If you can stand at the door or the threshold of the equipment room and you can see most of the network, you're probably in a class one. Okay, there's no backbone in it. Everything's horizontal cables from the from the face plates out on the walls, coming back to the horizontal cross connect, the patch panels, the 110 blocks. That's gonna be a class one. Class two is gonna be a single building or tenant served by one or more telecom spaces. So now it's kind of like class one, but now you have multiple telecom spaces, multiple telecom rooms, which means there's going to be backbone, copper backbone, fiber optic backbone. There's gonna be more patch panels, more pathways. So this so the labeling becomes a little bit more complex. So you have to label those kinds of things. So class two is probably where most of the telecom technicians, most of the wire monkeys, are gonna be dealing with. Class three is gonna be a campus environment. Now, this is where things kind of get kind of spicy because now you got a single piece of property with multiple buildings on it. Of course, an easy example would be like a university where you have a single piece of property and there's buildings all across that one campus. But it could be other things too. As long as it's a bunch of buildings on one piece of property. So now you have the horizontal cabling, the backbone cabling going from the horizontal cross connect to the main cross connect, but now you also have backbone cabling, interbuilding backbone cabling connecting all those buildings together. Those also have to be labeled, those pathways also have to be labeled, right? You're gonna have outside plank cable there. It could be copper, it could be fiber. Again, if you this is a little bit more involved, class three is a little bit more involved, but if you disconnect the wrong cable in class three, you might even bring down an entire building. So then class four is gonna be multiple sites and or campuses. Now, this is an enterprise level complexity, this is a big, big job. Think think of like the Department of Defense, Department of War, whichever you want to call it. They got military bases all over the all over the globe, and that would be a class four kind of sites, but they all connect back to the Pentagon at some kind of types of connectivity means. It can be data centers, Google data centers, they have them all over the country, Amazon data centers, again, all over the country. Basically, your nationwide corporations are gonna have these, like like a maybe a McDonald's, uh uh Wendy's, Walmart's, tracker supply, ruler kings. They've got multiple locations across larger geographical areas. At this point, spreadsheets stop working pretty well. Now you're gonna start driving into what's called AIM systems, asset management software, automated tracking. This is where it really starts becoming necessary.

When AIM Systems Start Making Sense

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Now, here you know, but Chuck, what is actually AIM? Okay, it's pretty simple. It's automated infrastructure management. Basically, it's a smart administration system. It can track connectivity, it can monitor changes, it can document ports, it can generate work orders, it can even track unauthorized changes. So the AIM system is a little bit more complex, a little bit harder to keep up, it's gonna require a little bit more labor and intelligence. But the fun part is when it comes time to do this news, ads, changes, aim systems are gonna make your job a little easier. Raise your hand if you want your job a little bit easier. I see you back there in the truck driving down that highway right now, waving your hands. I know you want to keep your job a little bit easier. So some job sites, you know, they're still using masking tape and sharpies, right? While other systems are using AI tracking for live port assignments. The industry has kind of both at the extremes right now. There's there are smart patch panels that literally, when you plug in, they can detect that something's plugged in and it can detect what's plugged in, and then it can alert the software, hey, we have some new device on this. That's that's what your AIM system is really going to be geared for. So

Choosing Labels That Actually Last

SPEAKER_01 15:44

now let's talk about the part that touches every technician every single day. Labels. Labels, labels. All labels are not created equal. Okay, they are not. There are labels made for cabling, there's labels made for patch panels, there's labels made for harsh environments. If you use the wrong label in the wrong scenario, you could find that the majority of the labels are going to disappear over a period of time. For example, if you use a cable that's designed, a label that's designed for cabling, so it's designed to go around a circular surface, and you try to put that on a flat surface like a patch panel, there are a good distinct possibility that those labels are going to fall off, and then nobody's gonna know where it is. So I'm going back to the TMM, it stresses that the label should be machine generated. Okay, so for example, like a like a brother P Touch or some other Brady system or a Panduit system, any of this is what generates labels because I don't care how well you think your handwriting is, it sucks. There's only one person in this entire world that I know has beautiful handwriting. His name is Hubert Hickson. He was I used to work with him at Hingles McCoy. That man had beautiful handwriting. You could always read his handwriting, but but everybody else, forget it. You cannot, you cannot read your handwriting. Sometimes I can't even read my own handwriting. So machine generated labels, don't use sharpies. This also mechanically driven. So no, you know, you know, no sharpies. Now, again, don't get me wrong, sharpies are fine for rough end, absolutely fine for rough end. But finished product, put a machine generated label on both ends of that cable so that way people know it's it's what it's gonna be labeled, they know where it goes, it's gonna be durable, it'll be there months and months and years later. It's gonna be consistent and it has to be understandable because it's not any one of those four things. Did you did you really have a good administration system? Again, avoid things like again, handwriting is just not good. Sharpies, like I said, they get they get rubbed off. And if you have an environment where it's been connect gonna be exposed to UV rays, I've seen them, I've seen them disappear. Why watch that? And and don't use some labeling abbreviation that you're the only person who knows how to use it. There's a type of labeling system I call the Larry labeling system. Now, Larry is just a I used to work with a guy named Larry, and let's just say he was a couple crowns short of a of a full box, and uh, but he thought he was the cat's meow. And uh so Larry, he's the kind of cable, kind of guy that he would label his cables data, voice, camera, temp, test, right? Okay, data what? Where's that cable go to? What's it come from? What kind of data does it have on it? Is it is it is it a voIP system? Because technically that's data. Is it a computer? That's technically data. Is it camera? That's technically data, right? And and and tell somebody tell me, how long is temporary? Is temporary one week, two weeks, ten weeks? Because I've seen some things labeled temp that have been there so long they have a layer of dust on them. They've been there for years. So the good thing, the good news is hopefully Larry's going to retire and we don't have those kinds of systems anymore. And because you know what? Nobody knows anything. Everybody's gonna be a continuous learner. Don't be that Larry. So

Building Labels That Tell A Story

SPEAKER_01 19:14

I'm just gonna give you a couple examples. Let's say that you want to you had a saw you saw a face plate that was labeled 3a.a04.35 semicolon 01. What does that really mean? When you break it down, it's pretty simple. The 3A tells you to go to the closet on the third floor. It's the A closet. Every time there's more than one closet on the third floor. There's an A closet, a B closet, and a C closet. It's the third floor A closet. So you know exactly which closet to go to. You don't have to know where that imaginary center line is to try to figure out where the cables go that way, where the cables go that way. You already know it goes to the closet 3A. When you walk into 3A, you're gonna find the rack that says A04. Okay, and then it's gonna be the uh the cable's gonna return me on the patch panel sitting in rack unit 35, which is 10 rack units down from the top. So that's a little bit lower than uh than eye level. 35, and it's gonna be port 01. So 35 semicolon 01, rack patch panel and rack unit 35, port one. It's pretty simple, it tells a story. All right, it's a you in fact, if it's done correctly, if a good labeling system is done correctly, you can visually think about where the other end of that cable is before you've even walked away from the face plate. That's when you know that you got a good administration system. I

Why Room Number Labels Break

SPEAKER_01 20:33

had somebody ask me in in one of the uh one of my social media feeds, and I haven't been really responsive there lately, but again, the last 10 days have been horrible for me. But uh he asked me why is labeling by the room numbers a bad thing. Number one, room numbers change, they absolutely change all the time. And let's say that you've got uh a conference room and it's room 105. And let's say because it's a conference room, the customer wants two drops in there. If you're labeling it by the room number, you'll probably label those two drops 105A, 105B, or 105.1, 105.2, right? But let's say two years later you come out and you put in a third drop in that conference room, you're probably gonna label that cable 105C or 1053. Paint a picture with me. Where does 105C end up in the telecom racks? If you said right behind at the very end, you may or may not be right because if they've added cable since then, it's not even at the end anymore. You know, I was talking to my good friend TJ tonight when he he called me to check on me to see how I was doing, and I told him that I was gonna do tonight's show on on labeling. And he told me, and and and uh he's gonna be on a future show, by the way, talking about OPGW. I'm looking forward to that. We're gonna record that probably next week. But um, yeah, he told me, you know, a good labeling scheme should tell somebody where the cable starts, where the cable ends, maybe what cabin it's in, what port it's in. In and what's system in okay, without you calling it 2 a.m., you should be able to look at that labeling system and figure out everything you need to know about it. He even mentioned, and I like this idea, he even mentioned that maybe even putting in what kind of cable it is is inside plant, outside plant, opgw, you know, all kinds of stuff. So again, it it tells the story. Like I said, showed with the with the uh with the 3A A04 3501. I knew it was on the third floor, a closet, it's on the patch panel and rack unit 35, and it's port number one. Again, by reading the number, I could visually see in my head exactly where it is. Again, going by the room numbers, you can look for that 105C, and you go 105A, 105B, 106. Huh? Again, the room numbers don't tell the story, yeah, they just don't tell the story. Another

Color Codes Help But Don’t Replace

SPEAKER_01 22:53

thing it talks about in the TMM about administration, it talks about color coding. Now, this is an old telephony thing, and and and a lot of people go to the Bixie classes and they they go to the Bixie installer copper, installer fiber, the technician class, and they've learned these colors and they want to use their they're anxious to apply the knowledge that they learned. And I appreciate that. I absolutely appreciate that. And so what they'll say is okay, well, no, this these are these are um horizontal cables, so the patch cords have to be blue. Again, the the color code system, and I'll talk about they are here in a second, it's really for telephony, it's not really for Ethernet. I get that you want to do it that way, but again, it's really for telephony. And because when you when you go to a telephone room, a PBX room, for example, I happen to be in a courtyard, so it's stuck in my head here today, right? I'm in a courtyard somewhere in Georgia. Uh I guarantee you, somewhere in this building is a big room that has all the horizontal cables and all the background cables for this whole entire facility. The cables in the rooms, the background cables coming down, the back of the house stuff, the banquet rooms, everything. I'm in a rather large courtyard. Uh the banquet rooms, all that stuff. And literally every single wall of that room could be covered with blocks. And if you weren't the normal service technician and you didn't know where everything was, if you're trying to find the incoming dial tone, you'd have to literally go look at every single block on every wall. So the the telephony world came up with a colors code system where you can identify what types of service is on the can on the on the blocks by the color. So for example, and I when I say a color, it could be it could be a colored DESI, it could be a colored backboard, it could even be a uh for like 66 blocks, it can be a hinge door cover, right? So, for example, I'm I I mentioned incoming dial tone. Those blocks are gonna be labeled orange, okay. Again, an orange backboard, orange Desi, or an orange uh covered uh hinge door on the 66 blocks. So now you can just quickly scan. There's my orange blocks, go over there. Now you know you're only searching one small spot of one wall, not all four walls. Try to figure out what this was. And again, for those of you who raised your hand said that you want to make your job a little easier, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. This will make your job easier. Okay. Anything identified with green is going to be network equipment. Blue is going to be your horizontal cabling. So if you're again at the in the PBX room and you're trying to troubleshoot, let's say the payphone out by the lobby. For you young whippers schnappers who don't know what a payphone is. There's phones mounted on the wall you need to put money into to be able to make phone calls before we had cell phones. So that's gonna be connected with a horizontal cable coming back to the PBX room. Okay, white's gonna be your first level backbone, gray is gonna be your second backbone, brown will be campus, and yellow will be facility system, red will be even fire alarms. So, again, if you're looking for fire alarm cabling, again look for any blocks that are colored red. So it's a great system, but it's got telephony in its roots. So the color coding is helpful, but color coding alone is not documentation. You still need those labels, you still need those records because eventually everything becomes that blue cable. You don't know if you know what cables go where if it's not labeled correctly.

Consistency Rules For Both Ends

SPEAKER_01 26:15

So, best practices label both ends. Don't just label one end, label both ends. Better yet, listen up, label both ends with the same number. Yes, uh, yes, uh cable tracers can figure it out. They can actually figure, you know, you can tone a cable and figure it out, but that's gonna take extra time. And do you want to be the the technician on a Friday night who's trying to get home to your family because you're you know it's your wife's birthday and you're taking everybody out to go to Outbacks and you're running late because somebody didn't label both ends of the cable? I know I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be the person who did that to the person who's trying to get home on a Friday to his family. I'm just saying, make sure you keep your labeling consistent. Do not call it on the work area outlet side TR-1, and then on the on in the horizontal cross connect, label it one. Okay, make them both the exact same on both sides. Telecom room A on both, um maybe even MDF upstairs in the spreadsheet, because kiss consistency matters. Again, you want to know where the cable goes to, where the cable comes from. Using the machine generator label is going to be your absolute best friend. And this is where you have lots of lots of leeway. They got the handheld printers. I've got a couple, you probably see them on my podcast studio when I'm home recording. I've got a couple of those floating around that I use as well. Uh, but they're also um labeling, there's also labels that you can use with spreadsheets, labels you can use with other types of software where you can generate it. Your project manager can can generate you sheets of labels. And if that's the case, listen to project managers. If you're making uh sheets of labels for your technicians, make three copies. Three copies, okay, because the first one's gonna get destroyed during the during the polling process, right? So that way they can take it off and do it with a good label, replace it with one of the labels that haven't been destroyed yet, and the third one, that's a backup because you know what? Sometimes labels get lost, okay. Handwritten labels, again, they're they're they're good for temporary labeling at best. Don't ever rely on them for futures for long-term stuff. I did a project one time for a government facility, and I was one of my technicians. I used to be again, I used to be the Bixie trainer for a company that I work for, and we went through labeling. We told him you can't use handwritten labels. So he's out doing work for this very big government agency, and the guy who was our point of contact was an old Mobell guy, and he wanted he wanted everything written in Sharpie. And when I went out to do the QA on the job site, the I saw the handwritten labels, and I I kind of jumped on my technician. I said, You know better than this. He said, But Chuck, that's what the customer wants. I tried to tell him that's not how we do it, that's not how the standard state do it. And he said he didn't care about the standard. So I went and talked to the customer and I explained to him why the industry doesn't use handwritten labels anymore. And you know what? Sometimes you just gotta learn how to talk at the on the same level as some people. And the customer said, Oh, you know what, I agree with you, let's go and use the labels. The key when labeling is think of this as you when you're labeling stuff. If I quit tomorrow, can the person coming in to work on this cable, can the person coming in to fix this copper cable plant, fiber cable plant, can they understand this system? That is professionalism. Professionalism. I kind of jokingly say when I teach classes, there's five types of labeling schemes. Uh, there's the one where the customer doesn't care what you label it. You know, they they they they're probably the office manager. There's somebody from corporate IT called them and said, there's somebody coming out to do some cabling on your job site today. They don't care what you label it, they don't even know why you're there. They just said, come see me when you're done, I'll sign your ticket. Okay. They don't care what you label it. Then there's other customers who want everything labeled sequentially. Drop number one, drop number two, drop number three, drop number four. Okay. Then there's also customers that are going to label everything by room numbers. I mentioned that earlier. And then there's the customers who come up with the labeling system all on their own and are the only ones who know how to decipher it. Those are the ones that I don't like because they make it way more difficult. See, that's the beautiful thing about labeling systems. It doesn't, if you got a small little, like I mentioned earlier, the veterinary office, and I got that on my head because as you know, for those who follow me on Facebook, my dog had to have surgery a couple weeks back because she hurt her her stomach flipped and she we'd run an emergency room. Small little veterinary office, you know, you don't have to have 3A-3501. Because you know what, there's only one telecom room, so you can that's scenario you can get by with just doing 3501. That's the patch panel recognition 35, it's port number one. And you can even do patch panel A01, A02. I've I see a lot of these guys labeling stuff, you know, on their on their patch panel stuff, and and it looks good. It absolutely looks good. But why not just put one label on the patch panel and then already use the labels that are printed on the patch panel? They will never fall off. They will never fall off. And uh I really think it's a uh I really think it's a conspiracy theory by the label manufacturers wanting us to label everything so they can set more labeling tape sometimes. I truly do. I truly do.

Documentation Makes It Maintainable

SPEAKER_01 31:31

But you know, labeling is only part of it. Documentation is also another part. You can't separate the two together. You can't separate the two. There's a there's you know, you're gonna have you have everything labeled, but you need to know where everything goes. You need to know, you know, you might need to create cut sheets, rack elevations, blueprints, pathway drawings, all that stuff comes together to make a complete comprehensive labeling system, uh, administration system. I shouldn't say living administration system. Because if it's done right, it's gonna make your job easier, it's gonna make your customer happier, and in the end, maybe even have more work from that customer. So again, the best wire monkeys, you know, again, you don't just install systems, you create systems. Listen to this, you create systems that people can trust. Anyone can take can make cables look pretty for a picture of that day. There's lots of them out there. People post us pictures of the cable plant, you know, on how they're good addressing cable. But the real professionals, the real professionals build an infrastructure that's going to be able to be maintained, it's gonna be able to be expanded. You can be able to troubleshoot it without without pulling all your hair out. It can be upgraded, and the best thing is, if it's done right, it can be understood years later, long after you retired, long after you've moved on. That is what telecommunications administration is really about. So

Final Challenge And Sign Off

SPEAKER_01 32:57

let me ask you this. This is my call to action. Okay, if this episode helped you understand telecom administration just a little bit better, would you just share it with another wire monkey to try to help that level up this industry? Because remember, knowledge is power, and the more you know, the more valuable you become. Again, look up all that information in the Anzi Standards and the T DMM because do it right or why do it at all? Till next time. Knowledge is power.