Chapter 17:  Planning for Installation

Study all associated vendor information and compare to transmission engineering standards for your organization. Prepare a complete facility sketch, showing all outside plant involved with this project (include cable pairs, repeater housing details, fault locate scheme, etc.). Prepare a similar sketch of all inside plant involved (include floor plan, bay layout, signal wiring, power wiring, alarms, etc.). Show transmission calculations that justify repeater spacing for the particular cable. After engineering approval, supply copies of all sketches to the installation crew, the local central office files, and headquarters files.

Once the installation has been completed, the installation crew must supply "as-built" drawings for files. These may very well be the original untouched drawings or they may have notations from the crew for the changes that they had to make during installation. Examples include setting option switches differently to achieve better performance, using different cable pairs from the plan, and installing plug-in cards into specific slots.

In some operating companies, this is all handled on paper drawings. In others, this is handled exclusively with electronic files.