Individual floor telephone areas, sometimes referred to as LAN Rooms or DF (
Intermediate Distribution Frame) "closets," have grown from 25 square-foot spaces with no special air conditioning requirements to 250 square-foot rooms with heavy duty cooling needs.
A 100-pair copper riser cable, a six-fiber multimode, and a six-fiber singlemode cable are connected from each floor by the
intermediate distribution frame to the computer center.
The fiber panel can handle up to 70 computer connections and an Ethernet backbone runs from each cabinet to the main school server, while various CAT 6 cables connect to main and
intermediate distribution frames for server connections and electrical power.
"I wanted to ensure that everything--from the design to all the components--in the data center, the main distribution frame (MDF) and
intermediate distribution frames (IDF) created a failsafe network.
Fiber-optic cable was used from the main distribution frame in each facility to the
intermediate distribution frames, while Category 5 UTP copper wire was used from the IDFs to the desktops.
The backbone in each school consists of: fiber, coax and copper for voice connected to the buildings' phone demarc, all run between the Main Distribution Frame (MDF) and
Intermediate Distribution frames (IDF).