John Hopkins Hospital
The new Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, MD, is a 1.6 million-square-foot hospital, consisting of connected two 12-story towers; one focusing on cardiovascular and critical care and the other for pediatric care and women’s health and which will replace the adjacent 50-year old hospital when it opens its doors in 2012.
Healthcare facilities are unique in that they require high-density connectivity and high-bandwidth applications. The recently ratified ANSI/TIA-1179 Healthcare Facility Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard addresses cabling methods to support a broader scope of application-specific systems requiring a range of work area densities, unique to this market.
At Johns Hopkins Hospital, they required a 40-gigabit backbone core, which would be delivered through diverse redundant runs of 20 gigabits from the MDF to the 48 Telecommunications Rooms. For the horizontal cabling, they required at least one gigabit to each workstation outlet for all IP applications – data, voice, paging, nurse call, A/V, real-time location sensoring and CATV. Density of workstation outlets varied from 8 outlets in a patient room to 38 in an operating room.
Together, Berk-Tek, a Nexans Company, and Legrand/Ortronics offer NetClear® cabling solutions, which are total end-to-end cabling systems with a 25-year warranty. They selected NetClear MM10, for the backbone and the NetClear GT2 premium Category 6 copper solution for the horizontal runs. In addition Berk-Tek provided interconnect fiber optic cable to specialty services and areas, such as physio monitoring, elevators, and on booms in the operating room.
Hudson Valley Community College
When Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) in Troy, NY, was faced with constructing a new five-story parking garage, the security and facilities departments wanted to make sure that all precautions were taken by installing the most advanced surveillance system, which included high-resolution IP cameras. To save installation time and costs, by eliminating electrical outlets at each camera, HVCC also wanted the cameras to be powered through Power over Ethernet (PoE) over the network to assure reliability, even during power outages, as all network equipment is backed by UPS systems through the college-managed electrical plant.
The design team, consisting of facilities and I.T. members, determined that a total of 55 cameras would be required and could be run on a parallel network tied to the main network 
switch. The I.T. department wanted to maintain consistency in the cable plant for all their networked applications – data, voice and security. In 2006, the entire campus infrastructure had been revamped and brought up to date. At that time, HVCC installed a NetClear® GT2 Category 6 solution from Berk-Tek and Legrand|Ortronics for all their data and voice cabling infrastructure. For the new parking garage they needed a long-distance cabling solution which would provide the same Category 6 bandwidth as well as PoE to the device.
Timing was perfect since Berk-Tek had just introduced the OneReach copper/fiber composite cable system that extends PoE and data capability further than the 100-meter distance limitations of copper twisted pair. The pre-terminated composite cables were connected into the rack mounted, power injectors in the Telecommunications Room, located in the guard’s area on the first floor. From there the cable ran to the various junction boxes in the garages, and terminated to 4-port media converters in these remote enclosure locations. From the enclosures, Berk-Tek LANmark-6 outside plant (OSP) cables were pulled to each camera and directly terminated, which provides one gigabit bandwidth performance as well as power.