Tim Coppinger, engineering technology coordinator for Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, stands proudly in the theater style classroom on the first floor of the new four story Science and Technology Building. Around the room, the desks arc gracefully on graduated levels, equipped with special articulated chairs. There is acoustic padding on the walls.
“We knew for certain when we designed this building that we didn’t know what the future might hold. We needed to be ready for whatever might come along. All six large classrooms in this building,” says Coppinger, “have electrical power at every seat, and this one is completely wired with Category 5e network connections for every student.” The classrooms accommodate between 57 and 118 students.
Each connection plate contains four ports, preloaded with Category 5e jacks. The other classrooms have been designed with conduits for future networking additions. The lectern in each room is already equipped with Category 5e, coaxial cable and mechanical fiber-optic connectors.
“We always think long-term around here,” says Keith Franger, director of telecommunications. “We’ve been the fastest-growing university in the state of Texas for the last five years, so our growth is a big issue to take into consideration when we plan. Technology growth is a big part of that.”
The Science and Technology Building a 68,000 square foot multidimensional teaching facility accommodating seven laboratory areas and a fourth-floor observatory is the latest example of that planning. “The key for the new building was flexibility,” Coppinger explains, “Where possible, we have not put in walls, but just left open spaces so that labs can grow and shrink as usage demands. We have also placed overhead cable trays in every room, for running network connections, and each laboratory has an external, or surface mounted, power panel, making it easy to run additional power anywhere in the lab.” This enables students to set up cells and control centers that span rooms and even floors.
For his wiring standard, Franger chose the NetSync Category 5e System from Leviton Voice & Data and Mohawk/CDT. All the voice and data wiring is being done in Category 5e. “This is actually the second building we’ve done in this format,” says Franger, “and it has been very successful.” The first building, the 9,600 square foot University Center completed in 1999, was wired completely in Leviton’s Category 5 cabling system.
For the Science and Technology Building, Franger and his team chose GigaMax Category 5e snap-in connectors, in Quad-106 QuickPort wallplates, coordinated with electrical outlets to save money and inventory space. Mohawk’s Megalan 400 plenum copper cables were wired back to 48-port patch panels in each of the four closets (one on each floor) and managed with Leviton’s hook and loop cable management ties. The backbone is Mohawk fiber, with 3 RU and 6 RU rackmount fiber panels at the frame. Fiber to the podium was run in the classrooms, using Thread Lock SC connectors, and QuickPort Snap-In F-connectors for multimedia applications.
“Telecommunications here operates as an auxiliary service,” Franger explains. “We actually issue every department invoices every month. The things that come back and haunt us, that we have to go back and work on a second or third time, those are killers. Being able to do a construction project and know we won’t have to revisit, is exactly what we are looking for.
“In the University Center when we started talking about patching voice into data, how the jacks would fit, because we were talking about plugging an RJ-15 into an RJ-45 type receptacle we were concerned that would cause a problem with our digital phones and the 568-A wiring scheme. We got some equipment down here, and duplicated what we were going to do to be sure it was going to work. So far, we’ve had no problems at all.”