Textbook cabling - Company Operations

Communications News, Nov, 2000 by Carol Everett Oliver

An educational and professional publishing company learns about state-of-the-art cabling infrastructure.

When international media company Pearson plc purchased Simon & Schuster's Educational and Professional Publishing companies last year, it not only created the world's largest education business, it inherited a gold mine of cabling and networking systems. Pearson acquired one of the largest educational publishing brands in the $4.6 billion buy, along with a state-of-the-art infrastructure with the capacity to manage the ever-increasing demands of document distribution, media distribution, file transferring, Interact access, digital archiving and global communications, as well as supporting various technology platforms.

In addition to Pearson Education, Pearson plc also owns The Financial Times, Penguin Putnam Publishing and Pearson Television. The new owners created the Pearson Technology Centre (PTC) as the IT corporate hub to serve all of the Pearson plc properties. Headquartered in Old Tappan, NJ, the PTC team provides technology services, including mainframe processing and data-center operations Web hosting, Internet access and security, desktop and server support, and wide area network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) operations to 60 Pearson locations worldwide.

One of the key services of the telecom group is infrastructure and network design, installation and standardization. All 40 Pearson locations in the U.S. are being standardized with cable infrastructure and network design. "Technology is constantly changing," states John Murphy, vice president of telecom and network technologies for Pearson Technology. "To keep up with that change and our users' demands for faster access and 99.9% network availability, we had to have a standard and common infrastructure that would support all of the current and future networking technologies, and one that we could easily manage with minimal staff and evolvement."

When Pearson Education built its new facility in Boston, the newly formed Pearson telecom team implemented the same cabling theories and layout that have been successful in all their locations. Although each facility has different functions and different networking requirements, the common demoninator is user requirements for connectivity and flexibility, and for quick access and large file data transfer/retrieval.

The corporate decision to install an efficient structured cabling system in all locations has resulted in common grounds to support the diverse applications. This system, which was installed in the Boston regional headquarters, incorporates a redundant fiber backbone and Category 6 cabling to the desk. The end-to-end system hardware and connectivity is a high-speed, high-capacity, high-throughput Ortronics GigaMo beyond Category 6 channel solution.

As a leading educational publisher, as well as a provider of digital content, the company has stepped up investment in developing Internet enterprises, distance learning and e-commerce. With more than 1,200 websites supporting its educational businesses worldwide, a well-planned cabling infrastructure and global network is vital at all Pearson Education facilities.

MURPHY'S LAW OF CABLING

"Because of the success of the common voice and data cabling infrastructure that was realized at the facilities in Carmel, IN; Upper Saddle River, Old Tappan and Paramus (all in New Jersey) and Rockefeller Center in New York City, we wired the new Pearson Education facility in Boston utilizing the same laws of cabling," notes Murphy.

In the Boston facility, John Murphy's law of cabling infrastructure layout still holds true. The growing demand for larger bandwidth, high-speed capacity and throughput, however, created the need to utilize the most advanced cabling products.

"The cable plant in the Boston facility needed to support a multimedia education publishing company, to link two adjacent buildings on multiple floors and a system that required a unique plan to provide sufficient speed, bandwidth and fault tolerance into the future," states Murphy. "Although we could use our same basic layout design in the closets and the corresponding numbering system, we wanted to bring our LAN into gigabit speeds. We chose BerkTek's LANmark 1000 Category 6 copper cabling to the desk, and Ortronics GigaMo end-to-end beyond Category 6 structured cabling and channel solution for the closet electronics and workstation outlets."

Murphy again teamed with Ed Donelan, president of Telecom Infrastructure (Brewster, NY) and a BICSI regional director, who helped to design and install all previous cabling plants and established a foundation for an infrastructure standard. Donelan carried his design into the Boston facility. "The core of this fault-free network is based on a redundant fiber-optic cable backbone," states Donelan. "Each composite fiber cable consists of 24 multimode fiber strands of 62.5 micron, six multimode fiber strands of .50 micron and six strands of 8.3 micron singlemode--all in one jacket. This combination protects the investment in the fiber backbone for any future networking applications, regardless of the network speed or bandwidth requirements over the next 10 years."