[Asterisk-Users] phones with two ethernet ports

[Peter Svensson]

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Race Vanderdecken wrote:

> For the life of me I will never understand why people believe that each
> cubical/desk needs it own 4-pair cable, CAT5 cable connect back to the
> server.

One word: flexibility.

Actually, normally you would run 2-4 cables / desk at once. The cost is 
not much greater that running a single cable.

The reason is that a large managed central switch is much cheaper than 
lots of managed swtiches distributed all over the place. Unamanged 
switches are cheap, but once you get past 40 connections or so you will 
really start to see the benefit of managed switches. Not to mention the 
advantages of being able to use vlan:s and so on.

Another benefit of the centralized system is that it is easy/cheap to 
upgrade to gigabit or some other technology. Perhaps you need to drop an 
isdn line somewhere, or connect two rooms via rs-232.

Do all the cabeling at once. Do lots of it. It is not that expensive. 

> Look folks, in your house there is a phone line that connects you, not
> all the way back to the phone company, but a green box in your
> neighborhood. This little box has about 1 line back to another box for
> every 10 phones in your neighborhood and so on to larger boxes until you
> hit the telephone company. (1:10 1:8 1:6, whatever, lets go with the
> easy math here.)

Dedicated copper back to the switch is a lot more common than 
having an aggregator. Those companies that use aggregators have a big 
problem when they want to start providing isdn and/or adsl. 

Peter