When Is It Time to Replace Network Cabling?

Network cables are part of the IT backbones of many businesses. Even if you've invested in top-tier cables, you'll eventually need to replace what you have. Look at five instances when you should work with local cabling services to determine the potential replacement options.

Obsolescence

Cables are usually creatures of their places in history. No one would still be running cables from the 1980s in an office today, for example. However, that doesn't mean there isn't a slow creep toward obsolescence. The cabling available even 5 or 10 years ago may not provide the needed bandwidth or speed to keep up with today's applications. If you see evidence of your systems no longer keeping up with network speed demands, there's a decent chance the cables are at fault. This is particularly the case if the problem seems to be network-wide.

Increasing Capacity Needs

Asking the same backbone to carry more connections is almost always a bad idea. You can make your building's cable handle a bigger load for a while by adding routers, switches, and other networking appliances. However, this is a bit like adding cars to a freeway without adding lanes. There comes a point where more cables will yield the best results. If you're continually adding on, it's a good idea to talk with a network cabling services provider about not only your current needs but future-proofing. You should consider what the network demands will be five years down the road so you won't have to return to the problem too soon.

Physical Breakage

Especially with fiber optic cables, brittleness becomes a problem over time. The cables can start physically failing. As the sheathing fails, the shielding becomes exposed to moisture in the air. This is a cascade of failures that will eventually trigger more bad sends and receives in the network, driving up latency.

Downtime

Oftentimes, the accumulation of all of the above issues eats away at network performance. No one problem may be the evident culprit, but they all contribute. If you're seeing repetitive and increasingly common network outages, it's worth looking at the cables as the source of your troubles.

New Demands

Cables that are in perfectly good condition may not be up to handling newer tasks. If a video production company moves from 1080p to 4K, for example, that can multiply its bandwidth needs overnight. Every file save becomes a tribulation, and they may have to move from something like Cat6 cables to fiber optics.