zlacker

The classic problem is similar to that of that other famous future-proof thing: wifi in hotels. All the fancy hotels that got high-end wifi in the 2000s had shitty Internet for a long time because it was too hard to redo.

Sometimes, building to throw away is the best model. If something is so resource intensive in a way where the externalities are not appropriately mitigated, the right way is to tax the externalities, not to go after specific things.

If these builds were too expensive to build, they wouldn't be built.

>>renewi+(OP)
Although the hotels that hardwired RJ45 to each room are still going strong.

>>jandre+0b
Right, they can stick APs in them. The point is that back then no one knew which tech would win and what tradeoff to make. Agility beats everything else except "guessing right".

>>renewi+Jc
For large institutions in the early 2000s, it was very obvious that Category 5 wiring and Ethernet was a difficult technology to beat. Even back then, most universities were running Ethernet to rooms in all new construction, and retrofitting spaces without it.

That infrastructure is still useful, 20 years on.

It isn't about agility or guessing right, it's about piloting attractive technologies (eg, small-scale DSL which uses existing phonelines, which was oftentimes a reliability nightmare), and keeping an eye to the future.