TIA approved the 1179-A Update: The New telecom standard for healthcare facilities

The first revision of the Telecommunications Industry Association’s (TIA) cabling standard for health care facilities will be published soon (TIA-1179), this is the case for the TIA-1179-A Revision.

This is very relevant for the Beyondtech team, most of our customer purchase equipment for the medical industry and is important to keep updating the telecom facilities in those health care institutions and centers.

This Standard provides the key features for the planning and execution of structured cabling and fiber optics in healthcare facilities. Including:

• Requirements for cabling (Including fiber optics and structured cabling)
• Cabling Topologies
• Cabling Distances
• Pathways and spaced

The TIA-1179-A was approved for publication when the TIA TR-42 Telecommunications Cabling Systems Engineering Committee met the week of June 12 of 2017.

One of the biggest issues for infrastructure design and deployment has been the lack of consistent cabling practices in today’s healthcare facilities. The impact of multiple IP technologies, combined with various integrated cabling systems, has caused the information and communications technology (ICT) industry to create consortiums of infrastructure manufacturers, healthcare IT professionals, network designers, and contractors to collaborate on creating documents for best cabling practices.

Formally titled the ANSI/TIA-1179-A Healthcare Facility Telecommunications Infrastructure, it is the first update of the original TIA-1179 standard, which was published in 2010 and provides a roadmap for health care standards in telecommunications.

In this post is available a guide from Bicsi from the last health care standards and explains the Healthcare I.T. Challenge, Regulations and requirements and the best cabling practices.

Source: Bicsi.com and Berk-Tek.

While the TIA-1179-A standard was in progress, The TIA Collaboration committee including Cindy Montstream updated it and explained the significant changes from the previous edition.

This is a huge insight and it will provide the next roadmap for the future in the health care facilities.

• Balanced twisted-pair backbone cabling is now Category 6A minimum.
• Balanced twisted-pair horizontal cabling is now Category 6A minimum.
• OM4 is the recommended minimum for multimode optical fiber cabling.
• A minimum of two fibers are now required for optical fiber backbone cabling.
• Array connectors are now permitted for optical fiber cabling in the work area.
• MUTOAs and consolidation points may be used as additional network elements.
• Requirements were added for: telecommunications pathways and spaces (additional requirements to those in ANSI/TIA-569-D); bonding and grounding; firestopping; broadband coaxial cabling; multi-tenant building spaces.
• Recommendations were added for cabling for wireless access points and distributed antenna systems.

Once published, the ANSI/TIA-1179-A standard will be available at the TIA Standards Store via IHS.