In my last post on Inadequate Campus Infrastructure, I attempted to draw a word picture of conduits. Since then, my team met again with decision makers of the campus and the key person held up a slip of paper to show us the most important task on his agenda. In hand printed lettering on a scrap piece of paper he held up "CONDUITS," and that should tell a story that at least one person understands. Conduits are highways to and from the cloud and without them, your future is what, wireless only?
Way back in the early 1980s, we had Satellite Business Systems (SBS) and they came about because of the cost of "infrastructure" and expectations that people would favor cheaper voice calls and ignore or tolerate the latency. However, the cost of erecting large satellite dish receivers and gaining roof space was an issue for some, as was the delay introduced into conversations.
The communications vault or "pull box" are a few names of the gathering of conduits that eventually lead into the inside of your building. Below is a vault that houses all communications facilities entering from the street and back out to other buildings on a site.
This real estate is imperative for any campus or building, and without adequate planning or anticipation of what's ahead, your costs today to adequately assess and install these infrastructure improvements are nothing compared to the possible losses in the future.
Let me explain. Infrastructure improvements must provide for the public utility's requirements of having a "dedicated conduit plus one" solely for their use and purpose. Should you want another provider, they may require only one dedicated conduit solely for their use and purpose, and chances are they may settle for some smurf tube pulled through a shared pipe--but don't count on the public utility such as Verizon buying into that idea.
Conduit vaults also serve for interconnecting other buildings on the same property. They become invaluable because without them, the cost of public services goes up because of replication. Without properly sized conduits your building or property will suffer in resale.
The communications vault must have a sufficient number of dedicated conduits from the box to the building minimum point of presence (MPOP) for the public utility provider. Then, sufficient conduits must also be provided for private facilities for the property. Private and public often mix only in the vault, and even then it can be precarious because the vault is accessible by both public and private concerns. Then, the conduits must not prevent the installation of modern communications infrastructure; namely fiber and a lot less copper. Your architects and builders won't necessarily pay attention. It's a box in the ground, out of sight and seemingly always ending up as someone else's problem.
Below is a marked up photo showing the turns in the original conduit bank serving a campus. Follow the purple arrows and you should see why you don't want to install fiber or anything else in conduit banks like these. While it's always possible to do, the turns alone will create wasted fill space within the conduits and fewer facilities will fit into the conduits simply because they won't be able to push past the many turns, with installed fiber and cabling bending outward to push past turns.
Don't assume because there are building plans that those plans have assessed your current and future needs for conduit. Then, consider that copper is on a downward trend but still necessary in many situations. When dealing with public regulated services, you may need to extend conduits from the vault all the way to the street, because there's been a shift, with the telcos only willing to bring in fiber if the customer provides conduit to the street. The shift is the cost burden from the telco to the customer.
Copper, cable (coax) and fiber will still need to co-exist for a long time. Both public and private facilities may be sharing the same communications vault, so your adopted cable types may need to change just for the comfort of knowing that someone else has access to your cable vault and may be installing over your existing work.
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