On February 21, 2012 at 11:31, mwstorch said...
SB, as for the racks:
We make phone and cable accessible from the front of the rack to keep the phone and cable guy from getting behind it.
Our racks do not have any customer useable equipment in them (DVD is in TV cabinet), so I view it as mechanical only. We show the customer that ALL of the wires are HERE and LABELED.
I especially don't want the cable guy inside my rack. Nor do I want him to deny a customer service because he won't roll the rack out or is afraid of it.
Selfishly, I don't want to babysit the cable guy for routine service calls, so we land every cable wire on a rack mount passthrough and label. We install the cable amp (same make and model as the cable company) so we can control the install without the typical cable guy "I've never seen that amp before, so it must be the problem, call the guy who installed it."
I'd like to believe that this is saving us truck rolls. In any event, we've never had anything go wrong because the wiring is in the front.
What's your experience?
This all makes good sense. I take a different approach and always do phone and cable/sat TV distribution in a structured wiring panel (even if it's in the same closet next to the rack). This keeps the cable and phone guys out of my rack, but doesn't keep them from messing up the structured wiring panel.
It seems like I'm always stretched for rack space, so keeping the phone and cable in it's own enclosure also frees up valuable rack space.
