Australia urgently needs ICT infrastructure design certification

At the recent BICSI Conference in Melbourne, ICT engineering consultant Lawrence McKenna emphasised the costly ramifications of inadequately skilled ICT cabling designers in Australia, calling for the industry to ‘raise the bar’ or suffer further financial losses.

Below are some extracts from his presentation:

“Australian organisations desperately need their ICT infrastructure certified to current government regulations and industry best-practice.

“For too long, organisations have endured sub-standard and even non-compliant ICT infrastructure that manifests itself in inefficient and ineffective communications within businesses, unnecessarily robbing them of millions of dollars. Some systems are so poorly installed that they pose life-threatening hazards to workers and the community.

“Over the past nine months, I researched ICT infrastructure and found the current ‘landscape’ appalling. The Victorian economy, for example, is annually losing approximately $4 billion due to poor design, installation and testing of ICT cabling.

“With Australia developing into a digital economy, our dependency on ICT technology is underscored by the integrity, or conversely the fragility, of the infrastructure that supports it, much like the foundations of a high-rise building. Sadly, my research reveals its fragility.”

The problems experienced can be broken down into three areas:

Design: McKenna found many customer cabling designs (legislated by the Telecommunications Act 1997 - s20) were undertaken by both unregistered and registered mechanical, electrical and ITEE engineers, and by physical security consultants and AV consultants. It was disturbing to learn that many designers didn’t understand the intent or contents of the Act or supporting standards. Many lacked the knowledge to interpret them correctly to provide accurate designs.

Construction: The Act also mandates all customer cabling be installed by a registered cabler. McKenna’s research revealed that many of such systems were frequently installed by unregistered personnel. Furthermore, many installers lacked a technical understanding of cabling standards or industry best-practices. Most disturbing was the frightful number of installation practices that actually endangered people’s lives through electrocution.

Testing and acceptance: A NATA-certified testing company provided McKenna with information on client-submitted customer cabling test results. Of all the test results submitted nationally in 2012: 24% of data cabling wasn’t compliant and 41% of fibre optic cabling wasn’t compliant. Some of the reasons for non-compliance were: testing to lower standards than specified (intentionally to achieve a pass); deletion of failed results; and duplication and renaming of test results.

The manifestation of these problems is billions of dollars of lost productivity. Without appropriate action, these losses will only get worse as the NBN rolls out, unless we act now to remedy the situation, said McKenna.

McKenna strongly encourages government and business to adopt the practices outlined below, to curb the current digital economic loss:

• Commercial customer cabling design be undertaken only by registered ITEE engineers. The key to this is life-safety. However, this in itself is not sufficient. The engineer should undertake additional industry training.
• All customer cabling installations to be undertaken by registered cablers, with additional industry training.
• NATA review of all cabling test results, as this imposes accountability on installers.