Re: EU Standard plug
>Ringmains kind of made economic sense in 1948.
Kind of the same thing can be said for the use of "twisted-pair" for "Ethernet" networking...
Back in the 1980's the use of Cat3 made sense, because that was what many buildings already had installed for telephony. But to perpetuate the "Ethernet over twisted-pair" myth all that had to be replaced by CAT5e then Cat6, Cat6a and in the near future Cat7...
However, the ring main concept makes a lot of engineering sense - just as the ring in computer networking does also.
I suggest that it is, in fact, those that who don't use ring mains as standard are being unnecessarily wasteful of a relatively scarce resource (ie. copper) and also have to more carefully plan their electrical installation and socket usage.