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Oh, my sweet summer child. How do you terminate 60,000 pairs of copper on a single rack? If they were all bundled together, the bundle itself would be larger th
by myself248 5y ago
Oh, my sweet summer child. How do you terminate 60,000 pairs of copper on a single rack? If they were all bundled together, the bundle itself would be larger than you. This still takes a large frame and lots of line-equipment racks.
Newer switches are smaller than older ones, but line-equipment can only get so dense and still have room to work on it. Some multi-floor offices have entire floors sitting empty because a new switch was installed elsewhere in the building and then the old one decommissioned and removed. But there's still tons (literally, probably dozens of tons) of transport equipment, cross-connect, power and cooling, etc.
- cm2187 5y agoI assumed that we had switched to some sort of switching infrastructure a long time ago, where you wouldn’t pull every single copper wire all the way to the exchange
- myself248 5y agoOutdoor infrastructure is built and maintained on the timescale of decades and centuries. It's not like software that you just apt-get upgrade. If we were building from scratch today, that might be how we'd do that, but for it to be done that way now, the technology would've had to be proven, reliable, affordable, environmentally rugged, and better than every alternative back in the 60s or 70s.