CITES Communications Plant Design

 

CITES Communications Plant Design is responsible for the telecommunications cable plant that exists on the University of Illinois campus. The distribution system consists of 110 manholes, 90 miles of underground copper cable and 69 miles of fiber-optic cable which serve over 22,000 stations. Communications Plant Design is principally concerned with the physical media design, e.g. copper, coax, single and multi-mode fiber, of the in-building and inter-building wiring over which network and voice communications is transported.

Documenting Systems with AutoCAD Drawings

CITES engineers document the configuration and evolution of outside and inside plant telecommunications systems using the computer-aided design (CAD) software AutoCAD. Drawings of outside plant systems show the main wiring distribution centers (called nodes), the conduit paths that connect one node to the next, and the paths that connect the nodes to the various buildings they service. Inside plant CAD drawings are maintained for every campus building with twenty or more A-B telecommunications jacks (the University's standard dual jack configuration in which the so-called A-jack is used for telephone connections and the B-jack is used or reserved for data communications/computer networking). The drawings of in-building communications systems consist of multiple layers. At the bottom layer is a footprint of the basic floor plan of the building. Another layer shows the conduit paths within the building and a third layer shows the building cabling distribution. As telecommunications systems are changed or updated, the AutoCAD drawings are modified to reflect their most recent state. NDO staff rely heavily on CITES Communications Plant Design's drawings to determine whether the existing cabling infrastructure is adequate or must be reinforced for the in-building network and whether and where special hardware will be required to handle distance problems.

Developing and Enforcing Standards

Another critical function of the CITES Communications Plant Design group is the development and enforcement of standards for campus-wide telecommunications systems. Their current standards, set forth in the 1989 UIUC Building Standards, deal primarily with voice and, secondarily, data communications using the B-jack. The group is now in the process of revising standards to include specifications for the installation of coaxial cable, multi-mode fiber and single-mode fiber. With these standards in hand, CITES engineers work with architects, engineers, and outside contractors to make sure that new construction and remodeling projects conform to existing guidelines and take newer technologies (such as FDDI) into account in terms of the overall project design. When working with outside parties, engineers try to emphasize that investing a few extra dollars during the construction process to accommodate a building-wide fiber distribution can, in the long run, save considerable amounts of money, especially when compared to retrofitting the same building for fiber sometime in the future.

The CITES Communications Plant Design group also works with outside agencies such as the City of Urbana to make sure that all installations conform to city engineering codes. Where two different standards exist (one for the city and the other for the university) generally the more stringent specification is applied.

Source: Lynn Ward, Network Design Office Has New Neighbors: CCSO Engineering, UIUCnet, V5-3 April 1992

23 January 1995
Christine Gressley
Debbie Fligor

Ported to the CITES website by CITES Documentation, December 2002