I just posted this to my facebook page. I have a strong hunch that at
least one or two people on this list will empathize with this.
Life in engineer land.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who worked in engineering in a
previous life, got in touch with me. Another friend of hers, also an
engineer, was about to get a second broadband connection and needed a
network cable run from his phone box to his server room. Sometimes
these installations are straightforward and take a few minutes, other
times, not so much and it takes someone who knows what they are doing.
So the first order of business was for me to head over there, scope out
the place and see if I could help, or if it would be wise to refer the
job to a friend of mine who owns a network cabling business, and
actually knows what he's doing. The evening I was free, I headed over
there with another friend who happens to be an engineer, on our way to
something else.
So, to set the stage. We need to run a 20m (or 60 foot) cable, from the
outside wall of the condo, across the ceiling of the garage, and up two
floors to the office. In effect, we are throwing four engineers at the
job. In the real world, what would happen would be that a real business
would send their installer out, with a box of cable, a fish line, and a
drill, who would spend 10-20 minutes tracking down the existing wires,
another half hour running the line, and 10-20 minutes terminating the line.
But, this isn't the real world, this is engineerland. The first step is
to find out where the cable starts, and where it ends, then to figure
out if a new cable can be easily run. This process takes something like
forty minutes. We determine that it can, indeed be done. But, I'm an
engineer, I have to look for any opportunity to optimize. So, I ask the
question, "while we're doing this, are there any other lines that it
makes sense to run or upgrade?".
Now, we start reverse engineering the existing network. Two hours
later, we've decided to replace the cat 5 of the existing DSL line with
cat 6, move the DSL modem from the downstairs office in the kitchen to
the server room, and to upgrade the cat 5 lines from the server room to
the wall plates in each of the kitchen office and the dining room.
In short, it has taken us about two hours to change the scope of the job
from running a single cable from the phone box to the server room, to
running two cables, and to replace four cat 5 cables from the server
room with an effective 1 gigabit bandwidth, to cat 6 cable with a
theoretical 10 gigabit bandwidth.
One of the most important things I've learned in my engineering career
is to get a good set of job requirements before you start. There are few
things more important than being able to know when you have actually
finished the job. Yes, the requirements may change while you are
working on things, but it's important to note (for billing purposes if
nothing else) that they have indeed changed.
The next step is for the customer to get a rough estimate of the
distances and send me a note, or spreadsheet, that says:
2 wires from point A to B, approximately 60 feet
2 wires from point B to C, approximately 10 feet
2 wires from point B to D, approximately 40 feet
RJ 45 connectors at points B,C, and D.
What I received was a PDF diagram with 15 different locations, color
coded lines marking each of the different cables, notes on the distances
between each location, and notes as to which distances are to be the
installed cat 6, and which are to be patch cables.
At this point we start discussing the drawing over email and SMS,
considering such vital details as color of the wire, how to mark the
wire and jacks, running pull string for future enhancements (already
implicit in the plan), where to get the various items, scheduling and
just about every other detail except for the color of the electrons in
the cable.
At this point we have ordered the specially colored jacks, scheduled the
work for Monday, and have spent probably close to 15 engineering hours
on a task that would take a technician approximately an hour to do.
On the other hand, the customer will be able to surf the web from his
kitchen on a home network that is more finely engineered than the one in
an NSA supercomputer lab.
--
Larry Colen l...@red4est.com (postbox on min4est) http://red4est.com/lrc
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