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Posted By: mersadrad Electrician and Telecomunications - 03/24/11 04:08 AM
Times is changging. Electricity and telecomunications will soon be unseparable.

How do we benefit from this?

Should we( electricians) be the ones to push regulations under the code. Does that means more standards, safety, work?

Topic is not related only for Canada.
Posted By: HotLine1 Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 03/24/11 01:34 PM
Mer:

Here in New Jersey tele/data (commercial) is installed either by ECs or tele/data contractors that hold a State issued "Wiring Exemption Card", which is basically a license for tele/data installation.

We also have a Fire Alarm & Burg Alarm licenses for those installations, both resi & comm.

For a long period of time I often wondered why some ECs did not install tele/data, cable TV, and other low voltage wiring.

Hope this helps you
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 03/24/11 07:30 PM
Florida lets an unlimited ED do data/phone LV too although few are really trained for data.
There is a specialty contractor license for LV only.
Posted By: hbiss Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 03/27/11 05:20 AM
For a long period of time I often wondered why some ECs did not install tele/data, cable TV, and other low voltage wiring.


Because they are being honest, many do not know how. Unfortunately most of the ones that do do the work only think they know how or just throw something in for the money.

Just because your license says you can and your supply house sells the material doesn't make you qualified. You need training and experience.

Should we( electricians) be the ones to push regulations under the code. Does that means more standards, safety, work?


What you don't understand is that these are separate trades and they aren't part of an EC's scope of work. So your statement that they are inseparable is not quite true. The electrical trade would like to control them but the current position of the construction industry has been to make LV a separate entity from electrical as shown by it's own division in the master format.

-Hal
Posted By: mersadrad Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/04/11 09:53 PM
Originally Posted by hbiss


What you don't understand is that these are separate trades and they aren't part of an EC's scope of work.

-Hal



Who are the people who can work in this field then. Before telecom was not part of electrician concern as long as it is extra low voltage. Now it is diffrent.

I say that all codes are made by people from the field. We are one of them and we should help to bring those regulations.
With all respect now at schools they tech us about splicing fiberoptics and programing.

Personally-I don't want to be an assambler.
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/04/11 10:58 PM
I agree the trade is going to split. You are going to have guys who just want to work on big fat copper lots of amps and magnetic controllers the size of a small car then you will have guys who are working on computer systems that happen to be connected by wire, some of it pretty big.
Posted By: HotLine1 Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/05/11 03:34 AM
Hbiss replied to this:For a long period of time I often wondered why some ECs did not install tele/data, cable TV, and other low voltage wiring.

"Because they are being honest, many do not know how. Unfortunately most of the ones that do do the work only think they know how or just throw something in for the money.

Just because your license says you can and your supply house sells the material doesn't make you qualified. You need training and experience."

No doubt that training is necessary, and required for data/comm, security systems, card access, CCTV! I make mention of that fact to the apprentices at Vo-Tech.

Yes, I was one of the guys that liked the big, fat copper, big transformers, panels, etc.
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/05/11 03:55 AM
I lived in both worlds and I like the fat copper better myself. There is something reassuring hearing a huge magnetic controller clunking in and seeing a whole building light up. wink

You certainly can't say one requires more skill than the other, it is just a different skill set.

I do think we will be seeing a lot of cross training as electronic controllers continue the move into the equipment vaults. Smart homes, smart commercial buildings and the smart grid will make us all computer guys.
Posted By: ghost307 Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/05/11 02:10 PM
First let me say that I have a lot of respect for the folks who do LV wiring and IT installations and they know it.

That being said, I like to lightheartedly kid them that they chose their line of work because some of us can't handle the really big electrons...and some of us can't handle the really little electrons.

I think it takes a different temperament to deal with wrestling a 500 kcmil into a lug than it does to finesse a 24 AWG without untwisting or overbending it.

Folks who can do both well are getting very scarce.
I can see a day in the very near future when there will be separate Subs to handle Power wiring and Communications wiring.
Posted By: HotLine1 Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/05/11 11:50 PM
Ghost:
You hit it right. I personally do not have the patience for the 'little wire', nor do I have the hands for it either. Many years of THHN/THWN & the 'big stuff' has taken its toll on my hands. I replaced all the phone lines in my home last year, and the terminations were tough.

I agree with you on the respect also. I have done inspections on three large data centers recently, and the cabling installs were really outstanding!! I commented to the installers "nice job"! One foreman was shocked!
Posted By: hbiss Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/07/11 01:24 AM
I think it takes a different temperament to deal with wrestling a 500 kcmil into a lug than it does to finesse a 24 AWG without untwisting or overbending it.


I agree with that, I am a telcom guy and former EC. I can handle a small data installation but I would go out of my mind if I had to terminate hundreds of CAT6 jacks.

Also, you really can't lump all LV together. LV is made up of many separate and very specialized trades such as data, telecom, CATV, audio, etc,etc. Being proficient at one does not mean the person knows anything about another.

The NEC tries to cover all of LV with the singular objective of providing a safe installation. Following its requirements does not in any way mean that the installation is technically correct or even that it will work. The NEC only provides the minimum requirements so that the installation will not harm people or property. Consequently, any licensing only grants that the person who passed the test has a working knowledge of the Code requirements. A license should not be viewed as a license to do such work, only that you know how to do it safely.

Unfortunately there are some who think holding a license means that they are competant to do whatever it covers.

-Hal
Posted By: mersadrad Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/13/11 05:09 AM
That was a great explanation. So what now. We have many telecom guys who can't work under power. Every telecom guy should be partially electrician and specialize in particular field. For this you need recognized standards. If you are an electrician it is easier to approch this problem. Now it is sad couse people do use it in a bad way, but again it is becouse of no NTC-national telecomunications code.
Posted By: HotLine1 Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/14/11 02:40 AM
Mersadrad:
Keeping in mind that you are in Canada & I can only comment on the situation here in NJ....

Electrical Contractors are 'allowed' to do all wiring by state law; IF they so choose, and are qualified/trained to do it 'all'.

Yes, there are ECs that do data/comm very well, and ECs that do data/comm not so well.

Data/comm requires a state issued 'Wiring Exemption Card' for data/comm ONLY! Period, that's it, NO electrical work.

My personal business philosophy was 'do what you do best, and what you know' from day one to the last day.

The actual functionality & operation of the data/comm is not addressed by the NEC, as the wiring methods and materials are addressed. (As Hbiss stated above)

For any Canadian information please try a PM or email to one of the Canadian members, or send me a PM/email & I will move this thread to the Canadian Section!
Posted By: mersadrad Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/14/11 04:51 AM
No need John, it is clear where one side of our trade is shifting. In Canada basicly we folow what US do. We take what we think is right and rotate a little what we don't find it nesserry. It is quite the same on this topic.


Chears...Mersad
Posted By: Tesla Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/14/11 05:08 AM
During the early years of datacom standards were very much lower.

In many jurisdictions no license even existed.

That's what happens in a brand new field.

As time has gone by LV established itself as the lower paid craft.

That was a market decision. The typical 'apprentice' to a LV shop was just a monkey. No way did the j-men share much. Low pay and intermittent jobs caused massive turn-over.

Comes the dot.com boom and every monkey under the sun is hopping around pulling in datacom. Gradually the market realized that you can't use monkeys -- and standards lifted.

The latest high performance datacom is a whole new breed that requires serious talent -- and testing equipment to go with it.

So the datacom crowd has really elevated their game.

Out my way circa 2004 the LV crowd started up apprenticeship standards and back round checks, meaning no felons, no drugs, no arrests at all to stay in their club.

That has really elevated their game.

With the hard times now they want perfect driving records, too.

All of which means that their wage scale has headed straight north.

By comparison, j-men electricians are ten-a-penny out my way -- still.

Home construction is off by 90 percent here abouts.

But paranoia is a booming market.
Posted By: hbiss Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/16/11 02:18 AM
...you need recognized standards. If you are an electrician it is easier to approch this problem.

I completely agree that an electrician is going to easily learn and comply with the Code requirements of LV work whereas in my experience many if not most LV guys don't even know what the NEC or Code is and many don't even care.

During the early years of datacom standards were very much lower...

If you are talking about the standards for techs or workers, yes that's true but in many respects the thinking is still there today that anybody can install LV and it shouldn't cost much. So we have hacks who know nothing and customers who hire them and pay them nothing. Supply and demand.

-Hal
Posted By: HotLine1 Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 04/16/11 03:53 AM
Just an observation on data/comm.....
Recent inspection, data/comm laying on ceiling grid; strung over sprinkler pipes, & ty-wraped to MC ltg whips. Looked at the floor penetrations...1-1/4" EMT, conn/bushing on 'my side', down to lower floor....salami cuts, no conn/bush & 'what fire stop??" Mid-level floor of 15 story office bldg.

Red sticker & "Ill look at the rest, after you correct"

That was what I call a hack.

Next stop...above ceiling for data ctr. 1450+ cables, tray job two floors, 10 story office bldg. Only 'bad' thing I could find is they added another 175 cables & locations. Not a hack.

BTW, both are data/comm & access control contractors.
Posted By: Wmackay Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 02/07/14 09:25 PM
I do both and they are two very different trades with very little in common
Posted By: dsk Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 12/23/19 07:28 AM
We have had pretty different development of the
#1) Power
#2) Phone
#3) Data

#1) Historically the power demand has been greater, and the focus in codes has been to security.

#) Phones has worked equal for about 100 years, and the development has been in the last few years to be changing to use data communication and plug and play modules. Safety has been less in focus.

#3) Data has develloped from a transfer system using phone-lines to pretty complex solutions with a mix of fiber-optics and thin twisted copper wires. Personnel safety has not been an issue, but protecting the equipment has solved most of those issues.


By my opinion all working with one of the systems need to know thebasics of the 2 others, and then specilaze. (#2 seems to be a dying field)

dsk
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 12/24/19 12:09 AM
Now that we have power over ethernet we are blurring the lines again. A lot of those wall warts and other local low voltage supplies are going away but that ethernet cable is becoming a class 2 wiring method. Can Class 1 be far away (if it is not already here)?
I believe you are right about POTS (telephone) service. That is really leaving us fast. It is already not the service I grew up with where we had a battery powered pair going all the way from my phone to the central office, pretty much straight through. Now days, the "central office" is a silver box on the side of the road, connected to a fiber backbone and on utility power.
Posted By: Trumpy Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 12/26/19 04:06 AM
Greg,
I have to agree with you, in saying that the POTS system is pretty much a "sunset system".
I had mine taken out here at home in favour of a naked broad-band connection and while that is over copper, next year, I will have that upgraded to fibre, when I can afford that.

I did a training course some time ago on fibre work, probably 2 years ago, it is a LOT more involved than terminating cables into CAT5 or 6 with a punch-down tool.
Get your angle of cut wrong and you're screwed, these things are miniscule.
However, this is the way of the future, in years to come, we won't talk of copper conductors with respect to telecomms stuff and I think that is a great thing, it shows progression forwards.
It just means that the technicians that work with this sort of thing, need to be trained better.
Posted By: gfretwell Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 12/26/19 05:58 PM
I went to a school about 30 years ago where they showed us how to terminate fiber but in those days it was a lot more complicated than it is today. The tools improved. I have never had the chance to do it since. My broadband is still on copper too (telco/DSL). We finally have some competition to the existing cable company and they are bringing fiber to the home. I might be willing to go back to a cable company if these people can show me they are better than Comcast. Monopolies always suck.
Posted By: Trumpy Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 12/28/19 02:20 AM
Well,
May I say Greg, it doesn't get anymore "closed shop" than in New Zealand here.
For years, all you got was a copper POTS connection to your house, the incumbent government-owned Telecom did everything they could to stifle any sort of competition, by way of lobbying the government with ideas of reduced share-holder payout (back to the government), investor flight, you name it.

Then the Internet happened, this threw the hungry cat amongst the pigeons, Telecom were forced to un-bundle the local loop here and set up a seperate Infrastructure arm (now known as Chorus).

During the seemingly endless Ultra-Fast Broadband installs across New Zealand, Telecom (who were re-branded as Spark), threw all sorts of speed bumps in the way of Chorus and anyone else that wanted to come into the market, in the hope they would give up and leave.

Vodaphone NZ got a foot-hold in the market here and this has significantly bought prices down to the consumer, however not enough, like a lot of things in NZ, you end up with a du-opoly, and screams of price-fixing have been heard ever since.
Posted By: djk Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 01/22/20 01:54 AM
It was very similar here in Ireland until the late 1990s, when the market was fully opened to competition. Before that Telecom Éireann, which was a state owned corporation from 1983 until 1999 (and before that the Department of Posts and Telegraphs aka: P&T) ran the PSTN here.

They used to be fairly locked down until the late 80s when they let consumers do their own wiring and buy their own handsets, but before that Telecom did your internal wiring, installed all the RJ11 jacks and rented you the phones and in the 1970s it was either hardwired or used big old operator-board style classic wall jacks similar to an electric guitar plug, again only ever installed by P&T and the wiring schemes were often unnecessarily over complicated.

Initially competition was limited to just carrier preselect services, and then local loop unbundling arrived, although it had fairly limited impact due to the nature of the Irish network.
We've only about 4.7 million people, but because it's quite scattered outside a handful of cities, that population is served by well over 2000 local exchanges. In reality most of them are just remote concentrators containing line cards and DSLAMs, but they were uneconomic to unbundle. So, you ended up with unbundled services only at exchanges with perhaps 5000 lines. A lot of the smaller exchanges would have as few as a hundred lines and they weren't all rural either. Telecom tended to use a lot of distributed switching in the PSTN/ISDN days, even in urban areas. Often you'd have say a housing development or business park served by a small cabinet-based RSU linked to the local Ericsson AXE or Alcatel E10 switch by fibre.

Eventually the regulator had to intervene in the market and force down the wholesale access charges to ensure competition actually functioned.

We always had a large uptake of cable television, going way back to the 1960s, so the cable networks in the 2000s began to really see a huge upsurge in use for broadband and VoIP. They actually have more than 50% of broadband and voice in a lot of urban areas at this stage.

Eircom then rolled out VDSL cabinets which were capable of 100mbit/s using vectoring and those are providing service for a whole range of ISPs and TV providers and so on as a wholesale access network.

Eircom then became Eir and their wholesale/access division was rebranded Open eir. They've begun to rollout a lot of FTTH, including in rural areas.

A huge % of Eir's fixed services are 100Mbit/s VDSL at present.

Then along came Siro - a joint venture between ESB (The Electricity Supply Board) and Vodafone. They're building out a competing wholesale fibre access network that's using the ESB's power line infrastructure and ducts to carry fibres into homes. That's also available to a whole raft of ISPs - Vodafone, Sky, Digiweb, tons of local ones etc much like eir.

So, it's gone pretty seriously competitive now, with 3 competing access networks i.e. two direct FTTH networks and Cable TV networks.

The two FTTH networks sell 1Gbit/s services but can support 10Gbit/s (and has been demoed and trialled).
While Virgin Media's cable networks currently sell services to residential users that top out at 500mbit/s and up to a 1Gbit/s for business users. They're likely to also start selling 1Gbit/s for residential as they're competing with the two FTTH nets.

Virgin Media (Liberty Global) doesn't have to allow wholesale access on its cable network (as yet). So it's the only single-ISP access network.

There's also a 4th access network being rolled out by a contractor paid by the state. Again a whole sale network, so you won't buy service straight form them and it's aimed at reaching the few hundred thousand rural homes that aren't commercially viable for FTTH from any of the mainstream players.

It's become pretty aggressively competitive and the speeds are going way up, including in rural areas which is great. We'd a really dismal period in the early 2000s when Eircom dominated the whole thing and was dragging its feet on speeds and competition was still quite stifled.

As for the PSTN / POTS network - it's officially on sunset at this stage. If you order any new services from any of the phone companies, unless you've some very specific reason, they'll provide you with an access gateway that contains a VoIP ATA for phone. The TDM networks are being wound down quite rapidly.

A lot of the old Eir core network seems to have moved to VoIP at major node level with the existing AXE and E10 local switches really acting as access nodes for that and new subscriptions or people upgrading packages typically are moved by their ISP to a VoIP over broadband product unless they specifically object and demand an exchange-based dial tone or they're in a really remote area without fibre to home or VDSL.

Also the number of landline users of any tech POTS or VoIP is plummeting anyway as mobile phones are just absolutely dominant. I have a landline that came bundled with my internet using VoIP and I honestly don't even know the number. There isn't even any handset connected to it and I don't think I'm unusual.

Posted By: dsk Re: Electrician and Telecomunications - 12/18/21 06:54 PM
Looks pretty much like here in Norway. I am working at a scool that started up in an old building this autumn, no POTS possible. Mobiles all over... (Except for sneaking in some voip telephones)

And as the thread started, no the electricians does not do the job with communication systems, they use the persons certified for wifi and other data communication systems. I guess I have had 2 of those working there for 2 months, and regular electrician for 2-3 weeks.

Much to do in a 100 yrs old building :-)
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