Wall Plates Overview

Wall plates that you see every day, in just about every room, but you think about them not very often. There is a good chance you are not aware of the sheer variety of options out there when it comes to customizing your wall plates. Everyone knows about the traditional electrical wall plate, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are telephone wall plates, gang wall plates, RJ45 face plate and keystone wall plates, among other A/V and data options. There are fiber optic wall plate and network face plate that are customizable in pretty much any way you can think of. This paper can give you a comprehensive understanding of wall plates.

Introduction of Wall Plates
Wall plate, or wallplate, is a highly configurable wall plate outlet products, available in both single-gang and double-gang configurations. It is designed for use within Fiber-To-The-Desk (FTTD) applications but may also be used to connect telephones and other peripherals to a network.

Wall plates protect electrical outlets and accommodate a variety of cabling solutions such as coaxial, twisted pair, fiber, and HDMI cables. Wall plates protect your network by keeping your connections safe from dust, physical damage, and foreign objects. The following figure shows us a RJ45 wall plate.

A variety of fiber and copper adapters may be loaded in the wall plate outlet in any configuration. These adapters may be purchased individually or preloaded into the wall plate outlet. The wall plate outlet is also available with angled faces that allow fiber connectors and jumpers(i.e. fiber patch cables/cords) to easily transition and exit down the wall, a 4 port wall plate (4-Port SC interface) as shown in the figure below.

According to different networks, there are mainly two types of wall plates: fiber optic network wall plates, copper network wall plates.

Fiber Optic Network Wall Plates
Fiber optic network wall plates, or fiber optic wall plates, are wall plates that designed to bring fiber to the desk and widely used in multi-floor and high building, including bevel fiber optic wall plates with 45° adapter plug-in/out angle and hybrid fiber optic wall plates/outlets. The wall plates are available with LC, SC, ST, FC adapters. They can be applied in FTTH access, telecommunication, CATV, data communication networks etc.

Copper Network Wall Plates
Copper network wall plates, or network faceplates and network outlet faceplates, are something everyone has a passing familiarity with, but few people know how many different varieties there are. In addition to your usual 1, 2, and 3 gang duplex receptacles and toggle switch covers, there are also duplex/phone combinations; face plates for VGA, Cat5e, Cat6, S-Video, RCA and BNC connector modules; and red engraved plates for emergency use.

Outlet faceplates use a double gang faceplate for standard administrative outlet locations, with connectors for all copper and fiber optic cable. Standard administrative outlets may, by specific user request, use single gang outlet faceplates in conjunction with a reducing ring. For single gang outlet boxes, use a single gang outlet faceplate with appropriate connector locations and, if required, mounting lugs for wall phones. Outlet faceplate must include two blanks position for future applications.

Reference Document: Wall Plates Tutorial