These folk have plenty to complain about. After all, many of them are the guys'n'gals who get called out at night to fix your ISP connection. Their beefs (beeves?) center on features of networking gear that interfere with the efficient completion of their appointed rounds.
Examples include modules that can't be slotted into or out of routers easily; cable adapters that don't fit the equipment; sharp edges that cut engineers' hands; handles that don't work...
Here's a sampling of the choicer bits:
- "Why did Cisco not include side handles on the 12000 chassis? It's a heavy chassis, and I can imagine how many techs have thrown out their back moving that chassis around." (NOTE: Subsequently, the thread moved on to how the scissors-jack included with the product could lift a house, or double as an office coffee-table.)
- "Personally my issues are console-cable related: is
there a benefit to the HUGE variety of console pinouts
used by the various hardware vendors?"
- "Could people just pick ONE pinout and connector and stick with it? Please!"
- "I can't stand it when I sit down and find the keyboard in front of me has moved the 'backslash' key. It drives me crazy and prompts me to find a real keyboard right away to work with."
- "RJ45 connecters that have a rubber hood over the release. Grrrrr!"
- "The little clippy widgets (looks kind of like @) on some oldschool racks, that hold the nut in place for the hex-head bolt. Why these were considered desirable is beyond me."
- "The slimline DS3 patch panels. God help you should you need to do something with the two innermost wires on the back end of that -- there's barely room for pliers, much less fingers."
- "Any device whose physical characteristics make it a likely candidate to be shelf-mounted, yet which has side ventilation ports which will be blocked by the sides of a rack shelf."
- "Routers that will accomodate high density of OCx ports but only have the bus capacity to support a fraction of hem."
— Mary Jander, Senior Editor, Light Reading
Interactive services are clearly time of day specific as the systems rotate through servicing folks in various timezones. For example, primetime online service for residential tv, email, reading news, etc. matches local time of day.
So this is the big driver for residential/home web services, streaming video, etc.
So I disagree strongly. Time of day muxing is a very good idea. And my point was that it is easier to do with packet networks -- especially geographically open ones -- like the Internet.
-Victor