What's wrong with an optical fibre backbone? Philip Northeast
www.aviewfinderdarkly.com.au On 4/02/2016 9:27 AM, Larry Colen wrote:
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.
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