Many people have brought up the question of why use copper cabling instead of fiber for the majority of the building's ports. Currently a typical workstation shares a 10 mbps connection to the fiber ring with 4-10 other machines. Both fiber and category 5 copper offer throughout approaching 100 mpbs per station, so either represents a dramatic improvement. Fiber cabling is more expensive to install and terminate, and more difficult to handle than copper. Given the cost differential and that the difference in throughout is small, deployment of category 5 copper on a wide scale basis for general use makes sense, as does augmentation of existing fiber installations for use with equipment that requires it or comes equipped for it.
Fiber does, however, offer a number of advantages over copper.
Currently it is used for faster connections than can be achieved over copper. We already have significant quantities of fiber installed of various types and grades, and we intend to augment and upgrade the existing fiber to allow for it's use with newer technologies such as ATM and Gigabit ethernet. Long story short, we need both fiber and cat 5e copper in significant quantities.