IT and networking issues were the cause of 23% of outages in 2024 (Uptime Institute). When a building’s network drops, it’s someone’s job to find the right cable – and this is where compact bluetooth label printers can save some serious time.
What the outage figures say about cabling
Uptime’s annual outage analysis from 2025 pointed out the link (the rise) to growing IT/network complexity. Plus, change-management problems and misconfigurations only compounded the problem. And that is a fair description of any smart building. Access readers, lighting controls, CCTV, occupancy sensors, room-booking… these all end up on the same network. Each new addition is an iteration to something already live.
Network World’s Denise Dubie broke the network-related figures down even more (again, 2025). Of the major outages in Uptime’s data, it was configuration and change-management failures behind around 50%, hardware failure for 31%, line breakages for 17%.
Hardware failure (the dead switch, the burnt-out power supply) is perhaps what most imagine when they think of downtime. It accounted for less than a third. Cabling isn’t a category of its own (line breakages is probably the nearest thing), so nobody can put a number on how many failures a tangled cabinet causes.
The split still shows where the risk is – and quite clearly. Half of these outages came from changes to a working network, and a change is exactly the moment a technician has to pick one patch lead out of a bundle that all look the same.
Human error starts at an unlabelled port
Back to the Uptime release – it found nearly 40% of organisations had suffered a serious outage that was a human’s fault in the last three years alone. 85% of those came from staff not properly following procedures, or from procedures that were just flawed from the off. Together, the numbers suggest something like one organisation in three has had a major outage that came down to how a job was done.
Uptime doesn’t put two and two together for undocumented cabling, of course. The connection is an inference, if a short one. A change procedure that says “disconnect the uplink to the third-floor access controllers” assumes that someone can tell which lead that is. If the port has no label and the records are out of date, it’s all down to the poor old engineer to either guess or stop to trace the cable by hand. Guessing is how a procedure gets followed on paper and broken in the comms room (and how a routine change turns into an incident report).
A bluetooth label printer paired with a phone can allow the engineer to design, preview and print a label while still standing at the cabinet, so “label later” is less of a pitfall. Brady pitches its M211 at job sites, with a claimed all-day battery on a full charge and a body built to survive drops and shocks. For a facilities manager, the cost of a label printer and accessories is very much on the same list as the other essential business supplies for a well-run London office, and it is a good deal easier to budget for than an afternoon with the door readers offline.
What the standards expect from London installers
The UK benchmark is BS 6701. The current version (BS 6701:2016+A1:2017) was published in October 2017 and is now under review. Its 2017 amendment stitched on a section concerning the fire performance of telecommunications cables, bringing it into line with BS 7671, the wiring regulations electricians already work to. So a data cable now has a fire performance to meet as well as a signal to carry.
BS 6701 doesn’t stand alone. It leaves out the aspects covered by BS EN 50174, and for external cabling it requires installers to apply both BS EN 50174-1 and BS EN 50174-3 (as per TSD-2000-4-4-1). BS EN 50174-3 adds that local regulations (including safety) must be met as well. A London site with fibre running between blocks, or out to a car-park barrier, it doesn’t matter – they’re answering to at least three standards before anyone opens the comms room door.
BSI’s own summary of BS 6701 says nothing about labels. It does cover administration and maintenance and installation, and those are the two a messy cabinet fails first. Administration is just knowing what is plugged into what. Maintenance means changing it without taking down something nobody meant to touch.
All of this is the practical argument for tidy, recorded installations, whatever the outage statistics can or can’t prove. They can be debated all day, but it’s clear that each standard assumes the installation can be inspected, maintained and changed by someone new. In a building that keeps adding devices, that person winds up keep coming back. They will arrive with the drawings in one hand and a torch in the other, and whether the labels on the ports match the drawings will be all the difference.
Featured image credit: La Miko via Pexels
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