“In previous years,” says Steven Foster, EMEA marketing manager with Siemon, “structured cabling has often been seen as just another part of the building, like the electrical wires and water pipes. However, over recent years it has been regularly reported in the press that a high proportion of network downtime is due to faults and mistakes at the physical (cabling) infrastructure layer. Management in all business disciplines now understand the crippling effect that IT downtime can have – with cost implications from £1,000s to £multi-millions per hour of network downtime.

“The results of this in-depth research clearly show that end users have realised the critical role cabling infrastructure plays in running the IT applications now demanded by the business world. Rather than just part of the building, the LAN is finally being recognised as a mission critical part of the IT provision,” said Foster. “With 10Gigabit/s equipment now imminent, the sensitivity and performance of the infrastructure is brought into sharp focus and this research proves that quality is now uppermost in the minds of IT decision makers when choosing their structured cabling,” he said.