Essential Install October 2017 | Page 16

Essential Install | CEDIA The great fibre provider Martyn Goody, senior designer at CEDIA member company, Marquee Home, discusses the importance of fibre optic cabling use and pre-wiring in the residential world. Let’s be clear about this, I’m not talking about All-bran. Fibre optic cabling has been a main stay of our cabling architecture for some time now. AV rack locations, HDTV (now 4K) outlets, Slave audio & network hubs, RF distribution, and incoming services DP’s all feature a fibre connection for use within current systems and pre-wires for systems unknown. Understanding the basics of cabling is key for installers Single vs Multi? You have to first understand the basics and the limitations of any cable that you intend to place in one of your designs. Should I go single mode or multi-mode? The reality is that, while single mode fibre has an extremely high bandwidth, multimode fibre has limited bandwidth characteristics that significantly influences the maximum distance that you can transmit high resolution/definition video signals. There are benefits to both selections; single mode will carry a greater distance, but on the other hand, most products feature a multi-mode interface. This is with the exception of RF distribution, which will only run on single mode so you have to take this into consideration when designing a system. One to use and one to lose Marquee Home says there’s been an uplift in clients demanding FTTP (fibre to the property) We spend a lot of time looking at what is current and what is on the horizon of technology for our clients. The saying ‘the most expensive cable is the one you forget’ has been a mainstay for many years so the theory is plan for the worst and hope for the best. I’m not here to tell you how you should design your infrastructure because who’s to say I know better than you? As a rule of thumb, all our TV outlet plates currently feature a shotgun multimode fibre OM3 cable from Cleerline (available through Habitech). We’ve also seen an uplift in clients demanding FTTP (fibre to the property) in lieu of the standard FTTC (fibre to the cabinet). Providing pull ducts from incoming entry points on properties to FibreFox break out boxes ensure service providers, such as BT and alike can terminate straight onto the infrastructure you’ve designed. We use a 63mm green flexi duct with a built in pull cord for future use and to date, Virgin have used it alongside Openreach and others. Point to Point vs Send & Receive? Simple enough to follow I would guess. We all live in a world where we use these phrases quite often but it’s not as it seems. Point to point would be over one cable. Video over fibre, for example, uses a single fibre from point A to point B but you still have a sender (HDMI to fibre) and a receiver (fibre to HDMI). The reason this is point to point is that the data only travels one way. Send & Receive, on the other hand, using GBIC’s for networks have a send/receive on both ends, requiring two fibre cables much the same as the transmit pair and the receive pair in an Ethernet cable. Time to polish those ends It’s not always easy to get a dust free environment on site and with contractors and clients rushing through projects, this can be problematic. We’ve used outside contractors in the past to come in and polish and terminate cables at rack and outlet end, which works on large scale projects but it’s not so efficient on a smaller project. With that in mind, the solution from Cleerline enabled all our engineers to field terminate both ends without the need to book in a third party contractor. The cost of the field termination kit was about the same cost as a third party contractor for the day so it’s paid for itself many times over already. More information: Marquee Home marqueehome.co.uk 14 | October 2017