🚀 go-pugleaf

Our old offices were wired with thin Ethernet.  When we moved to new space,
we completely prewired it with Information Outlets and abandoned thin
Ethernet.  What we did was to buy a bunch of DELNIs, and pull transceiver
cable from each office to a nearby DELNI, and run one cable from each DELNI
to the backbone Ethernet in the ceiling.  This gives us regular fat Ethernet
everywhere but at a cost of only about $150/station compared to two or three
times that if every transceiver cable went to an actual transceiver.

The thin ethernet does indeed work electrically just like fat Ethernet and
you can connect fat to thin through barrel connectors.  The problem with thin
cable is that it is very fragile and that it is not so great for prewiring.
As someone else suggested, we had little loops coming out of the wall with
barrel connectors, and hooked up a station by taking out the barrel connector
and putting in a longer loop to the machine, in our case IBM PCs and the like.
Thin Ethernet cable is fragile enough that if you step on it, you are likely
to damage it enough that it won't work.  That combined with the grief of
fiddling with the loops of cable drove us back to thick Ethernet with nice
sturdy transceiver cables and connectors.  I'd go with thick if I could
possibly afford it.  Thin is fine for patching up stuff around a lab, but
it's just too flimsy for permanent wiring in offices.

John Levine, ima!johnl