While the initial investment for structured cabling does cost much more as compared to traditional cabling, it is very important to look at the long-term benefits of structured cabling.

While comparing structured cabling against the traditional methods of cabling, it is very important to understand that structured cabling involves a long term investment.

A second point to note is that any additions, moves, or changes in traditional cabling involves bringing down the entire network for that period of time that the alterations are not made. In large organizations, large down times affect productivity drastically. It is very important to take these indirect costs into consideration while making a comparison of structured cabling against traditional cabling.

Structured cabling, as already stressed is technology independent. The same cables that were designed to take 10 Mbps, today, scale to accept the high bandwidth of 1,000 Base T. In comparison, traditional cabling would involve the reworking the entire investment to migrate to the same technology.

It is possible to build a relatively simple financial model which calculates the cumulative costs(i.e. initial price plus operating costs) for both structured cabling system and the proprietary systems.

The major factors which affect the model are:-

The initial number of users.

Rate of growth in the number of users.

The number of different IT systems in use.

The number of moves and changes in staff location.

In environments where all the factors are relatively low (i.e. 20% using IT; 15% growth in IT usage per annum; 2 different type of system,(e.g. Novell, Unix,) 25% move and changes per annum) a graph similar to fig 1 would be expected. This indicates that a proprietary cable system starts to cost more than the structured alternative after 3 years. At the start of the eighth year of usage by selecting the structured approach would have spent approximately 66% of the amount spent by selecting a proprietary cable system.

Low Level of moves and changes

 Costs                                       Year of Ownership

If now we consider a company where the key factors are relatively high(i.e.70% using IT; 25% growth in IT usage per annum; 4 different type of system, (e.g. voice serial, coax, IBM twin axial) 100% moves and changes per annum) a graph similar to fig 2 would be produced. This indicates that a proprietary cable system starts to cost more than the structured alternative after 1 year. At the start of the eight year of usage by selecting the structured approach would have spent approximately only 33% of the amount spent by selecting a proprietary cable system.

High Level of moves and changes

Costs                                            Year of Ownership