Cabling Site Surveys: The Questions That Set the Price
An estimate built from a floor plan is a guess, because nearly everything that drives cost on a cabling job is invisible on a drawing. A survey turns the guess into a number. KSEDCO walks buildings across Georgia for this work: corporate fit-outs in metro Atlanta, distribution space that has grown along I-16 and I-95 behind the Port of Savannah, plants around Macon and Columbus, and student housing near Athens. The walk is organized around five questions.
How far is the cable actually going?
Balanced twisted-pair is limited to a 100-meter channel: 90 meters of permanent link plus patch cords at each end. On a plan, a drop looks close to the telecom room. Walked out through the real pathway, around the elevator core, over the mechanical room and down an interior wall, that same drop can measure 130 meters. This one number decides whether the building needs a second telecom room, a fiber-fed remote enclosure, or nothing at all. It is also the most expensive thing to discover after the cable is on site.
Is there room in the pathway?
The constraint is almost never ceiling space. It is existing tray, conduit and sleeve fill. We check what is already there, identify abandoned cable that could be removed to free capacity, and confirm whether the riser sleeves are firestopped and whether the property will allow them re-opened. In older Atlanta towers the riser is shared and controlled by building engineering, which adds scheduling lead time that no drawing shows.
What is the environment doing to the cable?
Copper insertion loss rises with temperature, and industry guidance de-rates the usable length of a permanent link as ambient goes above roughly 20 degrees C. In an unconditioned Georgia warehouse in July, cable run tight to the roof deck sits well above the temperature anyone measures standing on the floor. We take readings at deck height, not at eye level. If a run leaves one building for another, we plan fiber rather than copper, and not for bandwidth reasons: Georgia sees a high number of thunderstorm days a year, and fiber carries no ground potential difference between separately grounded structures.
Where is the bonding?
Telecom bonding and grounding is the part of a survey most often skipped and most often behind intermittent faults a year later. We locate the telecom main busbar, verify that each telecom room has its own busbar bonded back to it, and note the rooms where somebody grounded the rack to a convenient conduit clamp instead. On sites with generators, transfer switches or large variable-frequency drives, which describes most of the manufacturing along the I-75 corridor, this is worth an hour of real attention.
Who else is working in that ceiling, and when?
On a fit-out, sprinkler, duct and lighting occupy the same space and generally have priority in it. A survey that ignores the construction sequence produces a schedule nobody can hold. We note what is already installed, what is coming, and where our rough-in has to land relative to drywall and ceiling grid.
What the survey hands you
- Marked-up floor plans with drop locations, telecom room positions and the pathway routes we actually walked.
- Measured lengths for the longest runs, taken on site rather than scaled off a plan.
- A materials list: cable category and quantity, containment, sleeves, firestop, racks, panels and hardware.
- Photographs of every constraint found, so the numbers can be defended later when someone questions them.
- A short list of items the property manager or general contractor has to resolve before anyone mobilizes.
To schedule a survey, call (888) 360-0035 or contact the Georgia office at 2700 Cumberland Pkwy SE, Suite 410, Atlanta GA 30339.