INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cabling
How will smart buildings
help solve today and
tomorrow’s challenges?
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Arafat Yousef, Managing Director – Middle East and Africa, Nexans
Cabling Solutions, says to make a building ‘smart’ an integrated
approach to structured cabling and devices is required.
teams need to work together in entirely
new ways. Rethinking basic infrastructure
is essential. What’s more, historically, field
bus components and IT have always been
regarded as two completely separate things.
Arafat Yousef, Managing Director – Middle
East and Africa, Nexans Cabling Solutions
P
Providing a foundation with FTTO.
Which benefits can Intelligent
Buildings bring?
Fast and reliable Internet connections and
optimised controlling heating, ventilation,
aircon and lighting make an important
contribution to employee wellbeing and
happiness. Smart buildings help ensure
occupants’ safety with connected alarm
systems and IP cameras.
Furthermore, Power over Ethernet allows
the introduction of smart LED lighting
powered over the network connection.
Current LED systems can save up to 80%
energy compared to legacy lighting systems.
Introducing sensors makes lighting and space
usage even more efficient. Smart lighting
with built-in occupancy and ambient light
sensors that can change the light over the
course of the day also help increase employee
productivity. Intelligent Buildings can also
reduce energy and water consumption.
The convergence of networks that comes
with creating intelligent building networks
means IT and facilities management
www.intelligentcio.com
However, when making a building ‘smart’,
it is vital that all platforms and components
can communicate in a unified manner and
act as an integrated whole. That requires
a common language and an integrated
approach to structured cabling and devices.
By introducing a cross-platform, fully
integrated ‘central nervous system’ in
a building, or even between buildings,
investment and operational costs can
be reduced and implementation and
maintenance can be simplified.
Why choose FTTO?
This solution combines the benefits of both
copper and fibre to provide a future-proof
solution with high bandwidth and minimum
energy use. FTTO is especially suitable for
Intelligent Building environments as they
feature a high number of ports in large
buildings or across multiple buildings.
The solution not only supports standard
point-to-point topologies but also cascading
of systems. Design can be flexibly based on
project requirements.
Redundancy can be designed-in at the
access level in a cost-effective way by linking
each network path. In a traditional LAN
design, this would be extremely costly, but
FTTO can provide significant cost benefits
in situations where large areas need to be
covered or building usage requirements
impose specific restrictions. With no energy-
hungry floor distributors and technical
service rooms and support for energy-saving
features, FTTO could be considered the
most sustainable solution in terms of CO 2
footprint, waste and energy consumption.
Supporting growing demand for
Intelligent Buildings
FTTO combines passive fibre cabling and
active switches to provide Gigabit Ethernet
services from a central core switch to an FTTO
switch and from there to the end-user devices.
The excellent performance and simplicity
of the concept brings savings by reducing
complexity and enabling faster and easier
rollout, maintenance and expansion. The
scalability of the system allows you to
expand as you grow, ensuring expenditure is
always in line with current requirements.
FTTO eliminates the need for floor
distributors, separate fibre backbone, active
equipment, patch panels and racks, as well as
large volumes of horizontal copper cabling.
A significant advantage in an environment
where every square metre counts.
Increasing demand from the market for
more sustainable and low-carbon buildings
will only serve to sustain the demand for
Intelligent Buildings in the years to come
and FTTO can play a key role in meeting that
demand and facilitating the energy saving,
efficiency-enhancing innovations of today
and tomorrow. n
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