What’s a good tour without a group shot? Pete, surrounded here by several of his teammates, holds some CAT6a cable and prepares to plug back into his day job, having finished shepherding us around his labs. Wrapping up, it’s clear to me how much we take for granted. We plug in our network connections, they work, we’re happy, end of story. Only it’s not. There’s a mind-boggling amount of work, ingenuity, and expense (the X-Lab room alone houses over $5 million in test gear) that goes into making your network connection possible and reliable.
Pete and his team are a vital part of making your data connection a reality. And when you get faster feeds tomorrow, when 10GbE finally lands on your desktop in the next few years, and when you can transfer terabytes in the time it now takes you to send gigabytes, maybe give a silent nod to the X-Lab crew and remember all the years of work that made your connection possible.
