I have seen the sixty or so messages about this and have marveled how many can major on the minutia and ignore the obvious which Brielle brings out. First, Ethernet connectors have changed - Thicknet (RG8) with transceiver cables, thinnet, and now CAT series cables. Yep, I have bored in the vampire taps and crimped thinnet. In another venue I work we still have millions maybe billions of lines of COBOL code. Why? Because it works. Because the cost of conversion to something else is prohibitive. It is being done by attrition and I might say, painfully. One organization I am aware of was to have been extracted from the tar baby of its COBOL code that was originally written in 1968 in COBOL D before Y2K had to fix all of that to run properly over the millennium. And one company I am aware of had to convert its COBOL F to COBOL II to get there. I haven't followed it since 2003 but they were still working on getting free from COBOL then when I was offered a job helping them extricate from the mess. I was having too much fun with WAN's. BTW, I am retiring 2/28/13 - if anyone has a COBOL and/or CICS job out there with the right location and situation I may be interested. I am fantastic as translating COBOL into a language JAVA coders can understand. I write JAVA, I do not call JAVA coders programmers. Programming is the next thing to retirement. And RJ-45 has some of the same characteristics. It works. There are trillions of them out there in use and on equipment (the corresponding jacks). There are millions of techs who can put them on. Well, maybe that is going a little too far. I have seen too many techs who claim to know how who should be hung with their cabling. They are used for everything so nearly every wiring discipline knows them. There are millions of sets of tools to attach them. I just saw an installation where a ham radio transmitter was set up in a hospital "in case everything else fails" and they put the transmitter at the roof, ran a 20 foot pre-made coaxial cable with PL259's to the antenna and two CAT-5's down to the operator area where they put the control. The transceiver allows separation of the control head and the transceiver. The one cat 5 carries the controls - the connectors on the units are RJ-45. The other CAT-5? They made one pair out of the CAT5, tied 4 wires together to get enough copper to handle the speaker. Reason? The hospital wiring staff did not know how to put on a PL259 on RG-213. (Similar to RG-8). But they could run CAT-5 and put on RJ-45's. So to change we have to provide training, tools, adapters (another nightmare), labor to convert and for what? There is no other connector I am aware of and I haven't heard of any serious contender from anyone here. That means 30 million dollars development (my estimate) and five years till we get the beta models. And for what? I can't see any way we could get more than a 20% higher density, even ignoring noise and crosstalk issues. And even if we can get 50% more would it be worth it? Answer, MAYBE in some very specialized and/or badly designed situations (concentrating too much copper in one place rather than distributing to "close up switches" with fiber) where a higher density would be of value, yes. But now we create another set of adapters. I am a Ham Radio Operator - Extra Class. I work with Emergency Communications. Having one more connector type is one more big headache. Yes, if there is a real advantage, fine. Most ham hand held transceivers went from the venerable and solid BNC to the SMA a few years ago. They screw a 18 inch antenna on an SMA! Guess what? They break when you are lucky, otherwise they go intermittent. And just to make it more interesting one of the Chinese suppliers of very inferior HT's uses an SMA male on the radio, not an SMA female like everyone else. So now instead of having three antenna connector types in general use, N, PL259, BNC, each with their strengths and weaknesses and reasons to use in certain places, we have 5 with no serous reason for two of them. Note that HT's have used BNC and SMA, mobiles and bases are generally N, PL259 with a few BNC. I have standardized on bas/mobile at PL259 and SMA male for HT to maintain sanity. And to be able to work with others who have a dukes mixture I carry a small box of adapters. The IT industry trail is littered with computer languages that were written to fix some non-existent problem and all that did was create more confusion. Many claimed to allow anyone to code programs, something that is true but when you use people who really do not know how to program you produce tons of shit code that is nasty to make changes to - and maintenance of programs is usually 90% of life cycle costs. It is the same in a wire room when you let someone who doesn't know how to properly place wire do it. PASCAL is one example I can cite. It had absolutely no advantage over several other languages existing at the time but academia thought it was cute and pushed it. A few industries used it and created havoc with it. There were others like Ideal that many of you never heard of because they were never widely used but created a conversion opportunity when they were no longer supported. Ralph Brandt -----Original Message----- From: Brielle Bruns [mailto:bruns@2mbit.com] Sent: Friday, December 21, 2012 10:16 AM To: NANOG list Subject: Re: why haven't ethernet connectors changed? Some of us still have a stock of legacy gear and cables - things like v35 cables for connecting to CSU/DSUs, and even the occasional AUI hub. :) You wouldn't believe how much people will pay for legacy computer gear when they need it to keep their business going. -- Brielle Sent from my iPhone On Dec 21, 2012, at 7:57 AM, Matthew Black <Matthew.Black@csulb.edu> wrote:
http://www.blackbox.com/Store/Detail.aspx/Ethernet-Transceiver-Cable-Off ice-Environment-PVC-IEEE-802-3-Right-Angle-Connector-3-ft-0-9-m/LCN216%C 4%820003
Only $55.95 for a 3-foot transceiver cable. What was more surprising
is that Black Box is still around.
matthew black california state university, long beach
-----Original Message----- From: Michael Thomas [mailto:mike@mtcc.com] Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2012 10:20 AM To: NANOG list Subject: why haven't ethernet connectors changed?
I was looking at a Raspberry Pi board and was struck with how large
the ethernet
connector is in comparison to the board as a whole. It strikes me: ethernet connectors haven't changed that I'm aware in pretty much 25 years. Every other cable has changed several times in that time frame. I imaging that if anybody cared, ethernet cables could be many times smaller. Looking at wiring closets, etc, it seems like it might be a big win for density too.
So why, oh why, nanog the omniscient do we still use rj45's?
Mike