Is this a familiar situation with the data cabling in your offices? Is there just one of these or are there multiple situations throughout the building, hiding under desks, in cupboards and above ceilings?
The reason for the appearances of these “Mini Switches” is usually that as a company grows or invests in new equipment they find they don’t have enough IT cabling outlets to support what they need.
Additional staff will require extra data cabling outlets for PC’s and phones and as new equipment such a telephone systems are installed, new dedicated IT cabling outlets are required but not always available.
The quick fix approach shown in the photographs is to find 1 spare data cabling outlet and add on 5/8/16 way mini switches and plug all the new requirements into that. These can number 1 per room if the equipment installed needs a lot of new IT cabling outlets.
However, the more of these mini switches are installed, the greater the bottlenecks down the IT system. In a lot of cases these mini switches will then link from one to another. In some businesses we’ve seen (for example) a main switch linking to a floor serving switch to 4 mini switches in a row in each office. Several of them also had 2 connections between switches creating a loop on the network almost shutting it down completely.
