The lan thing makes sense, I could see that. Still an impressive amount of patch cables, if true. Plus those adapters are cheap but not dirt cheap, right?

You don’t actually need to adapt out of it. There are Ethernet-over-USB switches that output to USB directly. So all you need are USB cables, and you need them anyway to provide power. So all you are doing (compared to just power over USB) is to use an Ethernet-over-USB switch instead of an USB PSU.

Here’s the first one I found on google: www.digi.com/products/networking/…/anywhereusb

The one they advertise on that website has 24 USB outputs, but I’m sure you can find bigger ones. And from them you only need a single patch cable to the next proper switch.

There’s about 100 phones on the panel and another 100 on the other side, so that would be maybe 8 or 9 of these switches, all wired together into a 10 port switch and that one then is fed by a single input line.

The upside for a setup like this is that the bandwidth requirements per device are minuscule. It’s a lot of devices, but they aren’t doing anything for most of the time. That’s quite the opposite of what we usually plan for when designing a regular network where if we have hundreds of devices we expect them to actually do something as well.