Liberty AV keystone system analysis

Tektraco Telecoms is always studying various ways to improve the speed and quality of our works. One of the 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐞𝐬 when dealing with Category structured cable is 𝐤𝐞𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬, these are the devices with which you connect your network peripherals such as Wi-Fi Access points, PCs and networkable printers. They come in many flavours with various termination methods, the market has mostly settled on the ‘tooless’ type. In reality, if you try and terminate category cable without any tools you will run into trouble; one still needs tools to strip cable and this is where the story gets odd, one is meant to have superhuman strength in order to close the device which forces the individual conductors into metal teeth to make contact, this is shown in the video below at 3.34.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evhBIiwST8Q

Experienced technicians ‘hack’ around the problem, with our installers being extremely fast and good with the keystones. New recruits always complain when performing this task; they often end up with blisters and cuts after a few hours of work! We decided to look for solutions and came across a fantastic idea by Liberty AV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98biqbD2P9Y

It turns novice users into semi-pros, the question we had remaining was how does it compare to an experienced technician with their ‘hack’, particularly when we take into consideration the costs in terms of labour time and product? To do this we spent a morning with a new recruit and a master technician. They were given 20 keystones to terminate with the liberty AV and another 20 typical no brand keystones.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬:

Our junior technician could terminate the typical keystone with an average of 8 minutes, the liberty keystone on the other hand was around 4 minutes. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝟓𝟎% 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐬𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐝.

Our master technician on the other hand completed typical keystones in around 3 minutes and could complete liberty units in around 3 and a half minutes. In this case experience and training pay off with the Liberty system actually being slower. It is arguable that given time, the experienced technician will be slightly faster with the Liberty system.

So when we exclude cost, it would seem that the Liberty system can achieve huge value to new users and marginal value to experienced persons.