Tips for a Tidy Communications Cabinet

A cluttered communications cabinet is unpleasant to look at, confusing and difficult to work with. I’ve had to tidy up a few recently and it is a strangely satisfying task. Here are a few tips and some photos that show my basic approach.

• Use short cables between the patch panel and the network switches.
• Place 48-Port switches between port patch panels.
• Use Velcro ties to bind groups of cables together.

As you can see, the layout before was really difficult to work with, mainly due to the patch cable lengths. It was setup as follows (from top to bottom):

• 2 x 24 Port Patch Panels
• 1 x Cable Management Bar
• 1 x 24 Port Patch Panel
• 2 x 48 Port Netgear Switches
• 1 x Cable Management Bar

Even with shorter cables this layout would have still been a mess because so much unnecessary routing would be required. By moving the switches to sit between the patch panels you can patch every port without needing to route the cables anywhere other than the switch directly below or above it. In this example the switches were also swapped out for 48-Port UniFi PoE Switches. The patch cables are 25cm.

The next example isn’t as visually pleasing, because:

• The cabinet is too small. I couldn’t fit the required number of cable management bars.
• The existing analogue phone system forces patching to particular ports.
• I just didn’t have enough time.

It’s still an improvement and easier to work with, but I wasn’t completely happy with it. Hopefully they will be switching over to a 3CX VoIP system soon so at that point it can be completely reorganised.

The final one didn’t have a before photo, but it turned out simple and nice:

So if possible, make sure you have:

• Plenty of space.
• Lots of different cable lengths.
• Make effective use of cable management bars.

Let me know your ideas in the comments.