Wandering through the office buildings of the telco I work for, I happened to notice a ceiling panel had been removed for maintenance access. Slinking its hidden way through the heavens was a neatly tied up bundle of — at a guess — at least 30 Ethernet cables, snaking their way off to the cube farm. This set me thinking: is the local loop mentaility running much deeper than previously thought?
Creating a physical link for every cube creates problems. The layout of the offices becomes extremely inflexible. Add a new device and someone has to crawl up in the roof to route a new cable through. Why isn’t there a simple switch associated with every cluser of cubes? (Available from your nearest Best Buy for a few tens of dollars - cheaper than a large bunch of Ethernet cables run for tens of meters.)
Of course, allowing a flexible office layout where the local inhabitants can defy the cube police is almost certainly not corporate policy.
This same problem of local-loopism, of course, afflicts DSL with distance limits from the central office. The Internet is 30+ years old as a concept. Will the Internet’s distributed network technologies finally push aside legacy thinking before it gets to collect its pension and free bus pass?
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I’ve been re-reading you distilled wisdom, and I was thinking about the costs thing for Vonage.
(1) How much infrastructure do they need? It is more than nothing, but surely it isn’t as much as the POTS stuff that carriers already have (but probably needs and army to maintain).
(2) POTS providers are coping with the reduction in the number and usage of land lines by reducing the per-call fee but increasing the rental fee – “We’ll get your money anyway”. In the situation, POTS are playing the same game as Vonage, but probably not as well. High rental fee plus calls probably doesn’t sound as attractive as high rental cost plus no call costs. Note I believe Vonage is planning a service that also include Western Europe.
(3) Finally, homes that have broadband also have a computer. Admittedly only the lunatic fringe like us have machine on 24/7, but what does the cisco router do that a computer + a wireless adapter couldn’t do? Bluetooth or WLAN phones anyone?
Random fact for the day I leaned in Canada: Cisco is a native word meaning “unpredictable”, hence the Cisco river rapids.
As for local loopiness, I think insanity plays a large part in LAN design. On my floor of Rennie house, EVERY computer has an adapter and a piece of cross over cable between the cable coming out of the floor and the PC. I have never been given a reason why one small crossover wasn’t used with the switch for the floor, rather than a hundred crossover cables at the end nodes of the network. “We are all idiots” – Scott Adams.
R.
Posted by: at October 29, 2003 06:48 AM
A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling.
Posted by: at December 10, 2003 04:27 PM