the corp guy is wrong
Ours are distributed as well and we have no issues with slow response time. Switches are set up in the computer room for the office area and 4 different areas to cover the production floor. The switches on the floor are connected to the computer room via gigabit fiber. Our phone system is IP based as well, so it's not just computer traffic.
Darrell Spice, Jr. [link|http://www.spiceware.org/cgi-bin/spa.pl?album=./Artistic%20Overpass|Artistic Overpass]\n[link|http://www.spiceware.org/|SpiceWare] - We don't do Windows, it's too much of a chore
