Telepocalypse

Local loopiness

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?