Re:Fiber (Score 3, Insightful)

Let's take a look at the problem here. First of all, I don't think you probably have all the information that the tech commitee had when making their decision. There are a lot more factors to take into account than just internet access. I am the I.T. department for a K-12 school. We have fiber to the desktop in about half of our building. The rest of the building has fiber connections, but we are still using CAT 5 for the network. BTW, I do have a bit more than a couple of Cisco classes under my belt. You mentioned that the network was mostly 10mb hubs, etc. Okay, I can see your point of moving to switches, that's a good move. However, what kind of cabling do they have and how old is it. Maybe they're using CAT 3 currently and need to run new cable anyway to transition to 100/1000 mb. At that point, I would seriously consider fiber as an alternative. The fiber will have a longer life, is stronger and less prone to EMI. You can also install longer runs with fiber, which offsets the cost of secondary wiring closets and additional switches. Remember, wiring is an investment. A little extra effort upfront can reap huge rewards down the road. Maybe they don't need the bandwidth right now, but who's to say that they might need it in a year for some sort of video conferencing, or streaming video feeds? My fiber lines are 7 years old, but I don't foresee having to replace them anytime in the near future (5 - 10 years).