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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (30978)	8/15/2009 10:59:02 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

re: "As you can see everything conspires against copper loops." Yes, in the outside plant, at least. Inside, especially inside commercial buildings, is another story, where copper still reigns, although there's now ample reason to suspect that wireless and even fiber will impact copper inside commercial buildings too, but not as much. And copper's staying power, or sustainability (a counter-intuitive application of that phrase, if ever there was one) is due to the entrenched interests of an entire food chain that it supports. The products and services that copper designs have spawned over the years now enjoy a symbiotic relationship with it, and all of this stems primarily from its greatest limitations. This has been one of the most flummoxing ironies that I've studied throughout my entire career, a phenomenon consisting of one paradox situated on top of another, of monumental proportion and implication: Copper's greatest strength is its limitation, because in order to become sustainable in the presence of those limitations the remedies themselves have become indispensable, often-orthogonal artifacts due to their collateral and often unrelated characteristics affecting other areas of need. (I'm quite sure that some readers here have by this point already listed in their heads a number of other areas where this plays out large as well, probably the most prominent of which is the ecosystem we've here been calling the regulatorium.) Power over Ethernet, an application to power desktop phones and other devices, which piggybacked itself on top of Cat 5 cabling initially, is a perfect case in point. Some ICT practitioners argue that even if they wanted to replace copper LANs with WLANs and or fiber to the desk, they would NOT due to their perceived need for PoE to power their desktop phones and now a dozen or more other applications. I know. Don't say it. Wireless can fix all that. Perhaps, but don't tell me. Tell it to the myriad of industry sectors and buildings trades groups whose daily bread and butter collectively depend NOT on copper cabling itself, but on the remedies needed to surmount its greatest shortcomings. ------