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Room for Improvement on Installation Practices

We see the same common mistakes in many installations, many of which are unknown until they rear their heads and demand attention. Time is always the test of an installation, and this is what reveals weaknesses within the infrastructure.

Outdoors
Anything exposed to the outside elements requires attention, weatherproofing, and the right materials in the proper places. A few things I found on a recent installation were essentially layers of problems creating issues for users and hours of wasted time troubleshooting and chasing phantoms.

A network security camera was on the blink for weeks, off and on until it just stopped providing video footage. The first discovery was the cable jacket was weathered and faded; still, it was holding up. However, because the termination was not weatherproofed, the gold pins were corroded and one pin was charred. The patch cord failed to test using a Fluke LinkSprinter. We replaced the jack insert (termination), as well as the patch cord, and the camera was back in service. The core issue was not having an outdoor box to house the termination.

Another concern noted a paging horn requirement but the cabling contractor installed the cable through a substrate composite material made of foam and a spray-on material. The cable had no conduit, and no conduit could be safely anchored or attached to the material because the substrate was too weak to hold the weight. As a solution, we moved the cable, drilled through block and brick, and then mounted a surface box to house the cable for the outdoor paging horn.

Incompatible building materials and wrong approaches are often culprits, and these go hand in hand with a lack of knowledge and experience. Anything outdoors requires more attention to detail and the need to protect the gear and cabling from weather. Placing cables in the right place seems to be an age-old problem, whether indoors or outdoors, but can be particularly bad when affected by the external environment.

Production Work
Installing paging speakers and IP phones can be productive when the process is methodical. In a recent deployment of both endpoints, we used a Fluke LinkSprinter to test the port and were able to speed installation knowing the identity of the switch port, switch and IP address, and the endpoint IP address. In a system that doesn't support native VLAN tagging, we set static IP assignments on the phones first, registered them with the system, and then placed them in service and tagged their switch ports. We programmed and set the proper VLAN port values on the fly.

Dial Plan
This is usually an area of concern since many issues result from translations attempted by either modifying the dial plan and introducing conflict with other features or using a dial-plan schema that isn't compatible with the intended outcome. We encountered this case when a PRI service connected to a gateway had been replaced with a more cost-effective span. The new service would synch up, but would not work. In the system dial plan, the client had retained the old "99" for outgoing access, whereas in most new systems just a single "9" would be required to exit the gateway. Removing the second 9 enabled the new service.

Then in another case, dial access code trunks were found in the wrong trunk groups. Mixing members of various trunk groups isn't a good idea since the routing and capabilities of the trunk groups may affect call completion. The dial plan is essentially a routing methodology for calls and features. Knowing the inventory and then placing proper security features in each group will prevent unauthorized access or fraud.

To verify the dial plan, print out the details of the plan and then verify the routes against the dialing for all carriers. This may be a long and tedious task, but it proves the routing and you can verify not only the services in use but also that those services are being used properly. Dial plan editors are great tools, but the dial plans still must be tested, checked for accuracy and security, and then the routing behaviors verified.

Installations involve many details that turn into problems, which in and of themselves aren't complex. But, when they go ignored, they will lead to layers of problems that tend to get staff buried in troubleshooting that was easily preventable.

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