CNBC Inc. was forced to move from its Fort Lee, N.J., headquarters in 2003 because it had completely filled its raised-floor space with cabling and had no room for new wire. So it opened a $137 million, three-story, 355,000-square-foot facility just down the road in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. The new facility has a central equipment room that houses more than 600 racks of equipment.
Just five years after moving in, however, CNBC has expanded its broadcasting capabilities to the point where most of its 18-in. raised-floor space is once again filled to the brim. It can't add any more cabling to the top and it can't service the cabling at the bottom of the stack. So CNBC is considering the new Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocol, which will improve bandwidth over existing Ethernet cables by 100 times.