* Readers explain the Gigabit Ethernet capability of latest Cisco phone
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. Ask a stupid question in an e-mail newsletter and send it out to tens of thousands of intelligent readers, and you’ll get the same answer many, many times.
Last week I was discussing how Cisco’s latest LAN switching efforts seemed to focus on voice support, and at the end of the newsletter I mentioned that the company is also coming out with a new IP phone, one that supports Gigabit Ethernet. I made a flip comment about voice not needing a fraction of that kind of bandwidth and asked “someone” to explain that one to me.
I have to say I was glad to see so many people read all the way through the newsletter to that final paragraph. It’s a nice affirmation that the newsletter is actually being read – something you usually don’t get unless you screw up pretty bad.
Anyway, the answer to the question, as so many pointed out, is that the Gigabit Ethernet isn’t there for the phone. It’s there for a PC which could be hooked up to the LAN through the phone. This way, you don’t have to run separate cables for both the PC and the phone, and the phone won’t be a bottleneck for your Gigabit-capable PC.
As one reader wrote:
“We’ve seen some issues where a power user (engineering, for example) needed a Gig desktop connection but the phone switch port was a 100M bit/sec port – therefore they’d need two runs. Now just one run required.”
Another reader, after offering the same explanation, had some advice for me:
“Try thinking it through before you shoot off a commentary like this last one. Or try thinking faster.”
A few readers picked up on the tongue-in-cheek nature of my comments – and one even fired back with this:
“The phone was designed specially for our wives. It was measured that they are able to consume the whole bandwidth easily.”
Many thanks to all who wrote in.
