zlacker

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.