Infrastructure Quality
The infrastructure of client’s project is the back bone of all of the systems included in that project. This is worst possible place to skimp out and go cheap on it. Cheap wiring will degrade faster and fail faster than good true wire. Just because something says it’s copper, that does not mean that it is solid copper. A lot of wiring that is out there and that is used by most integrators to cut down on cost is wire that at it’s core is a different material that is copper coated. These materials are weaker in strength and in the ability to transmit signals. At the same time the wire manufacture is using these types of internal materials, they are also using an inferior outer jacket or insulation on the wire. This again makes it a weaker cable both by strength and in the ability to reject and block out interference on the cable. We will always only use solid copper wire along with a cable that has a great type of outer jacket for insulation against interference.
Infrastructure Size
Not only is it important to use a good quality infrastructure, it is critical to use the proper size infrastructure as well. Using an undersized wire can cause a number of issues for a system in the end. You can end up with pore sound quality out of high-end speakers. Weak sound out of any type of speaker. It can cause motors to be over worked every time they are driven and that will cause the motor to fail in a premature manner. These issues will not be covered by manufactures warranties and will end coming out the costing clients much more in the end verses what it would have cost to install the proper infrastructure up front.
Fiber Optic Infrastructure
Newer types of infrastructure are coming about in today’s time of technology. The need to keep up with the amount of data that needs to be transmitted from one device to another or from one system to another is greatly increasing each year. While standard category cable is still the go to for most integrators, we are really urging clients to install fiber wherever we can while still utilizing category cable in the areas that it can still preform the work load that is needed. The costs of fiber have come down drastically over the past few years and we try to use it or place it in areas that are needed now, but also where it will be needed in the future. Just as the growth from the ever old, but still useful coax cable to category cable made its way through projects about 10 years ago, fiber is now doing the same to category cable. We feel that all of the above stated infrastructure types are great, they just need to be used where they are appropriate and won’t be over taxed immediately or in the future.
Future Proofing Our Projects
There is another part of the infrastructure of a system that we see frequently missed or over looked by most integrators. That is the aspect of future proofing specific areas; if not all areas, with the ability to get new or extra infrastructure to those areas after the project is completed. This comes into play when our clients want to add another device in area and it needs it’s own independent pathway back to the head end of the system. Or if the new device requires a type of infrastructure that currently is not there. We can accomplish for our clients in many different ways and we will always recommend and walk our clients through what these are and how we can implement them easily into their project.
Here are some examples of the types of infrastructure that we use and recommend for our projects.
