Island Cubicles and dropping communication cables

Hello everyone,

I have a question as an electrical designer for you networking people that deal with the aftermath of decisions made by people like me. I like to do this right, so the IT people are happy and clients are happy.

When it comes to cubicle style office spaces, what do you like to see? In a normal office (standalone with walls) we'll just have regular phone/data outlets with 2xCAT6. Normally when I think of a work station, I think two cables.

With a cubicle style of workstations and dropping from the ceiling it seems like many drop poles can't handle the capacity with this philosophy. For example, 6 cubicles sitting in the middle of the room, that's 12 cables. I realize cables could be dropped at two points, but I want to make sure I'm thinking about this properly.

I realize for data, one could technically drop 1 cable, have a switch lying around the cubicles and go from the switch to each computer. This doesn't seem ideal and depending on client need, 6 computers sharing the total speed of 1 cable may not work.

I'm also aware that one could drop 6 cables for 6 workstations, and you can go cable into telephone, out telephone to computer. (I don't know if that's a specific type of phone system).

So I'm curious. What is ideal for this sort of scenario? Is 2xCAT6 for each cubicle workstation getting excessive? Is there a product I'm unaware of that makes this work a little better?