Black Box Hinged Fold-Down and Front-Access Patch Panels manual Overview, Hinged Fold-Down Panels

FEATURES

•Mount easily to racks or walls.

•Stack vertically.

•Multiple cable-entry points.

•Perfect for small-office network applications.

•Hinged Fold-Down Panels fold down or swing open.

•Front-Access Patch Panels are great for areas with limited rear access.

OVERVIEW

Caught between a rack and a small space? These panels organize your CAT5e cables without taking up the space a full-sized rack would!

Hinged Fold-Down Panels

The Hinged Fold-Down Panels are the perfect alternative to racks. They serve as a bench that supports the patch panel during termination. And they’re ideal when access to the rear of a rack or cabinet is limited. Further-more, these panels feature universal (T568A and T568B) wiring.

Models are available in rack and wallmount versions for CAT5e cabling. The wallmount version not only hinges down, but also swings out to the side for maximum flexibility.

All Hinged Fold-Down Panels allow the panel to be terminated from the front. And the compact design enables you to squeeze in multiple patch panels.

JPM201A-R2 is the fully assembled wallmount version. It includes a 48-port patch panel hinged to a 3.5-inch (8.9-cm) cable-management panel, and a wallmount bracket with cable entry points on both sides on the rear of the brackets.

JPM202A-R2 contains a 48-port patch panel hinged to the cable-management panel. It is for direct attachment to a relay rack or cabinet and does not include a wallmount bracket.

Front-Access Patch Panels

The Front-Access Panels provide front-access termination and patching in CAT5e performance levels. Use these panels to eliminate cable congestion behind the panel. These panels are perfect for use in small-office network applications as

a convenient, durable, high-performance cross connect. JPM047A contains a 12-port patch panel. For double the

connections, opt for the 24-port JPM048A patch panel.

Technically Speaking

Not sure what Category 5e is? Read on. And learn about Category 6 in the process!

The news on bandwidth.

The need for increased bandwidth never ceases—the more you have, the more you need. Applications keep getting more complex, and files keep getting bulkier. It won’t be long before you need to increase the speed of your network.

Don’t worry. Black Box experts are on call 24 hours a day to answer your questions. If you need help installing a network, or adding an additional drop, call us.

Because unshielded twisted-pair UTP cable is by far the most common networking cable, let’s take a brief look at where UTP is headed.

Category 5e: the improved Category 5.

Category 5e, also known as Enhanced Category 5 (CAT5e), was ratified in 1999. It’s an incremental improvement designed to enable cabling to support full-duplex Fast Ethernet operation and Gigabit Ethernet.

The main differences between CAT5 and CAT5e can be found in the specifications. The performance requirements have been raised slightly in the CAT5e standard.

CAT5e has stricter specifications for Power Sum Equal-Level Far-End Crosstalk (PS-ELFEXT), Near-End Crosstalk (NEXT), Attenuation, and Return Loss (RL) than those for Category 5. Like CAT5, CAT5e is a 100-MHz standard, but it has the capacity to handle bandwidth superior to that of CAT5. With these improvements, you can expect problem-free, full-duplex, 4-pair Ethernet transmissions over your CAT5e UTP.

Category 6.

The next level in the cabling hierarchy is Category 6 (CAT6)

(ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-B.2-1), which was ratified by the TIA/EIA in June 2002. CAT6 provides higher performance than CAT5e and features more stringent specifications for crosstalk and noise.

The quality of the data transmission depends upon the performance of the components of the channel. So to transmit according to CAT6 specs, jacks, patch cables, patch panels, cross-connects, and cabling must all meet CAT6 standards. (The channel basically includes everything from the wallplate to the wiring closet.) The CAT6 components are tested individually, and they are also tested together for performance. In addition, the standard calls for generic system performance so that CAT6 components from any vendor can be used in the channel.

CAT6 channel transmission requirements should result in a Power-Sum Attenuation-to-Crosstalk Ratio (PS-ACR) that’s greater than or equal to zero at 200 MHz.

In addition, all CAT6 components must be backward compatible with CAT5e, CAT5, and CAT3. If different category components are used with CAT6 components, then the channel will achieve the transmission performance of the lower category. For instance, if CAT6 cable is used with CAT5e jacks, the channel will perform at a CAT5e level.

Industry standards.

The advantage of sticking to the industry standards is the knowledge that your cabling will be compatible with standards applications. But the standards are always being improved upon, and it takes time to ratify a new standard. Often, as with CAT6, the final standard may be different from the proposed standard. For the latest information, contact our Tech Support experts.

8/27/2007	724-746-5500
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