A 100Mb FDDI ring connected Beckman's routers with one router attached to the campus network. The backbone coax originated from the routers and daisy chained to repeaters on the building subnets. Originally, the network designers placed the repeaters in network closets according to research group location. For a full description of the Beckman Institute network click here . The original network installation had some design considerations that eventually led to problems.
Research groups come and go, making the repeater placements oftentimes obsolete.
Due to the nature of 10base2 cabling, every user on a given segment must share the 10Mb bandwidth. Problems often occur when trying to route specific subnets to specific rooms. Often times these network connections become labor intensive and cost ineffective. An increase in the number of users means larger amounts of traffic across cabling segments at any given time. Increased traffic means increased chances for information collision and errors.