Networks & telecom

Fiber optics, structured cabling, conduit and cable tray fill, PoE, CCTV, point-to-point radio and equipment rooms.

Point-to-point radio link

Compute free-space path loss, 1st Fresnel zone radius, Earth bulge with k = 4/3, minimum tower height for 60% clearance, received level, fade margin and link availability.

Fresnel, towers, margin

Server room and rack

Paste your equipment list to get rack units and the number of 42U or 44U racks, power per rack, heat load in Btu/h and tons, N+1 cooling, current and UPS size in kVA.

U, kW, Btu/h, tons, kVA

Fiber optic power budget

Compute the loss of a single-mode or multimode fiber link with connectors, splices and splitters, the received power, margin and maximum reach, including GPON classes B+ and C+ from ITU-T G.984.2.

Loss, margin, reach, GPON

Conduit and tray fill

Compute conduit fill with NEC Chapter 9 limits, find the smallest EMT, RMC or PVC Schedule 40 trade size that complies and check cable tray fill for network and signal cables under NEC 392.22.

53/31/40%, EMT, RMC, tray

Estimate structured cabling for a floor per TIA-568 and ISO/IEC 11801: drops per work area, average run length, 1000 ft boxes with end waste, patch panels, cords, switches and rack height, with a warning for runs over 90 m (295 ft).

Drops, cable, patch panels, rack

CCTV storage and bandwidth

Compute storage for an IP CCTV system from each camera group’s resolution, fps, H.264/H.265 codec, quality and recording time: TB for the retention period, RAID drives, recorders and switch uplink bandwidth.

TB, drives, RAID, Mbit/s

PoE budget

Add up PoE ports by class (802.3af, at and bt Types 3 and 4), compute Cat5e or Cat6 cable loss and current, required switch power with margin, spare power and the UPS needed.

Classes, cable loss, spare