Elmatador:
I've spent almost all my years since graduating as an electrical engineer in software design,
development and deployment. Whenever anything goes wrong with my own home system, I spend 10 hours
looking at software, downloading drivers, updating the OS, playing with configuration
parameters, etc. After which, I discover that 90% of the time the problem was cabling!
In fact, by far, the majority of problems in telecom are physical connections.
Patch panels are a big business in the US. In fact, the last mile business is often driven by
such 'mundane' concerns as how to run and connect cables. This is why ADC, for
example, has such a good business; if you own the patch panel business, you have a
guaranteed foot in the door, and can sell everything else up the technology chain. A lot of people ignore such a 'low tech' business, but I think they are wrong.
When I designed my last switch, I assigned a group to use expert system technology to
define, and layout, the cabling- it was one of the harder programming jobs and was
handled by my most senior software engineer. When we were done you could configure
a switch extension and print the board, MDF, and cable layouts on line. Coding a layer
2 or 3 data stack is trivial by comparison. |
