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.
