Town of Arlington I-Net
Town Hall Installation

This page covers how the I-Net cabling & equipment is installed and connected at Arlington Town Hall.

We (meaning ACMI staff and myself) have drawn up a list of desired locations from which we'd like to be able to provide live television coverage. They are:

- Selectmen's Chambers (where Board of Selectmen traditionally holds its regular meetings)
- Selectmen's Hearing room (the large room in the center of Town Hall on the 2nd floor with windows out to the balcony)
- Town Clerk's Office back room (to facilitate election return coverage)
- Main Auditorium, at the left side (of the house), near the floor (to allow for single camera coverage of events on stage)
- Main Auditorium, in the balcony, at the right side (of the house) in the corner (to allow for multi-camera coverage)
- Meeting Room on the first floor of the Annex
- Meeting Room on the second floor of the Annex

These locations are all to be connected to the town's data processing network via switch equipment in the basement of town hall via CAT-5 cable or better, with RJ-45 jack plates at each location.

In addition, we decided to investigate the possibility of running an audio feed from the town hall auditorium public address system at stage right, up to the balcony location mentioned above. Currently, this feed is only connected to the location at the left side on the main floor.

On Monday, 8 January 2007, I scheduled a walk through to identify these locations to vendors who are bidding to provide connections to these rooms. During this time, we discovered that the second floor meeting room in the annex already has four connections, so we decided to have bidders test and certify those connections.

We decided to leave all coaxial cables in place to facilitate monitoring of programs via each cable TV company's "subscriber loop." This will allow us to monitor live cablecasts as subscribers are actually viewing them at home, a good way to confirm that both video and audio signals are reaching subscribers as intended.

We discovered that switching equpment in town hall basement is filled to capacity at the moment, so another switch will have to be obtained and installed.

This is the location where the switches are installed at this time, beneath the foyer on the Treasurer's side:

The low rack on the left and the banks of connection blocks on the back wall are all part of the town hall telephone system. The switches of interest are in the tall rack at the right, with the CAT-5 patch cords hanging down in front of them.

The coaxial cables in the building are all connected to existing Comcast equipment (as of 9 January 2007) in the boiler room behind the room shown above:

Some of this wiring is abandoned, as it is being replaced by the new digital I-Net. Other wiring shown here is part of the 'subscriber loop' which carries signals from Comcast to various parts of the building so that live cablecasts may be monitored and various town personnel can monitor news programs on broadcast channels. We expect RCN (and other vendors) to either utilize the abandoned or install similar coaxial cabling to carry their subscriber programming to the same locations.

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