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From: laubach@hpiag0.IAG.HP.COM (Mark Laubach)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: Why Ethernet-over-twisted-pair, anyway?
Message-ID: <1520002@hpiag0.IAG.HP.COM>
Date: 28 Nov 89 20:13:08 GMT
References: <4645@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Organization: HP Information Architecture Group - Cupertino, CA
Lines: 34

Well,

 1) if you've got trained phone installation people who know how to
    deal with twisted pair, then they already know how to wire for
    this new technology and you don't have to retrain them.

 2) Bringing back to a data patch panel (AT&T blocks for instance) allow 
    easy customization of the environment, and the ability to change.

 3) Having all the wires in one place makes troubleshooting a lot easier.

We have all our offices wired here with 4 4-pair modular outlets.  Two
are reserved for data, and terminate in a patch panel that we control
directly, the other two are for voice/pbx work and terminate where our
site phone people care about it.  In reality, its about two feet to
the left of our data panel.  

We are amazed at how convenient it is for rewiring the system to
change configurations, say to install another diskless unix cluster
and to hide the server and nodes behind a bridge regardless of were
the workstations are located.  Also, the amount of real coax that we
have is now minimized to a cabinet of starlan hubs and under the
computer room floor.  Also, the starlan hubs isolate some problems,
mostly electrical, that could potentially bring down a whole network
if we had used coax.

Hope this helps.

Mark Laubach
Information Architecture Group
Hewlett-Packard Company.