Structured cabling for smart buildings

The secret to a greener future is to get smart and get connected, and the place to start making it happen is staring you right in the face. 

Much has been done in the last 30 years to make energy consumption more efficient and to reduce the output of greenhouse gases. While known offenders like the automotive industry and data centres have been heavily targeted, the real villains in the piece - inefficient buildings - have escaped serious scrutiny. Left unchecked, outdated buildings represent a real challenge for the environment. Studies have indicated buildings are responsible worldwide for 40% of final energy consumption and 21% of greenhouse gas production.

Building the right infrastructure

Countries around the world are constructing national broadband networks and today most commercial buildings have a communications infrastructure, either cabled or in combination with a wireless network. Additionally, the data centre construction boom is not yet over and the industry continues to strive to achieve lower energy consumption to meet its power and cooling demands. Previously, such considerations were not factored in for residential and office buildings. However, that is fast changing because for a building, overall efficiency is the sum of all its parts. Germany’s energy passport, or energieausweis, provides an example of how it works - the owner of a building has to provide the energy consumption of his or her property, with the calculated or measured consumption in kWh/m².

Unlike northern Europe where, for most buildings, heating is the biggest part of an energy bill, in Australia heating, cooling and general electricity consumption are key parameters. This has contributed to a more holistic approach in construction, with building automation processes working in combination with more sophisticated IT and electronic systems to create intelligent or smart buildings.

Getting smarter

The idea of an intelligent building is not new, having been established about 20 years ago with the European Installation Bus (EIB). Today’s industry standard is the ISO 14543, which is based on the KNX network communications protocol for intelligent buildings, while the known LonTalk standard is now aligned with the ISO/IEC 14908 standard. 

All of these standards relate to a generic cabling infrastructure. For example, ISO 16484 evolved from a couple of proprietary protocols, while the ZigBee Alliance introduced an open interoperable wireless standard based on IEEE 802.15.4. 

For North America, TIA provides the 862 Building Automation Systems Cabling Standard for Commercial Buildings, focusing on cabling infrastructure for BAS systems - the next derivation of which is an IP-based model with devices using the IP protocol or using one of the existing protocols over IP. The current situation in Australia is somewhat confusing and the energy balance would improve if all the systems were based on one of these standards. With increasing use of smart meters and Google’s recent acquisition of NEST, a manufacturer of smart thermostats and smoke detectors, it is clear that the future is going to be full of IP devices, connected via a local or remote network.

Our connected future

Since all devices use the structured cabling system, the number of systems running in parallel is reduced and design and installation is simplified. With this in mind, the design of structured cabling will have to support the various new IP devices in different locations. As history has shown (since the introduction of the first industry standard in 1995), the key to attaining this goal will always be getting more bandwidth. Put simply, the only way to ensure system longevity is to get the highest available cabling bandwidth - because speeds and applications will change, demanding higher-bandwidth systems - thereby potentially laying the foundations for three more ethernet generations in the future.  

Planning is vital. For example, when the 10 GB ethernet was introduced in 2006, it could only be supported by Class F systems, which were defined in 2002. With an estimated lifetime of 20 to 30 years, they will contribute positively to the overall energy balance.

Looking even further ahead, as all devices are now IP devices, there are opportunities to make use of some alternative designs and concepts. Currently, most buildings in the world use a structured cabling design according to ISO/IEC 11801, with fibre for the campus and backbone and copper for the horizontal area, requiring several switches and higher power consumption.
An alternative approach employs an optical fibre network, which uses technologies installed for fibre-to-the-home networks. This reduces the number of active devices and instead distributes the signal with passive splitters, using smaller switches or ONTs close to the user/end device to provide PoE and a media conversion to copper. 

This simplified infrastructure consumes less power and the rapid-fire technology employed has the added advantage of making nearly all the components re-usable. The revolutionary idea is based on new bend-insensitive fibres and factory-terminated connectors, with the cable installed like an extension cord. Additionally, as all products have an integrated spool for slack storage, the usual length issue with factory-terminated cable assemblies is eliminated.

By taking a holistic approach encompassing all the advantages of connecting today’s advanced IT infrastructures with environmentally friendly materials, smart buildings will be the intelligent way to help reduce global energy consumption for a greener future