Fast and Gigabit Ethernet Media and Standards
The Fast (100 Mbps) and Gigabit (1000 Mbps) Ethernet standards specify the use of either unshielded twisted-pair wire (UTP) or fiber optic media. UTP cabling is cheaper and easier to use than fiber optics, but it has some distance limitations. We therefore tend to use UTP to the desktop within a building, and fiber optics for heavy traffic network links either within a building or as a network backbone between buildings.
UTP Cabling
The most common cabling for Fast and Gigabit Ethernet today is twistedpair wire. It is inexpensive and easy to set up and maintain. Twisted-pair wire cables contain one or more pairs of copper wires that are twisted in a spiral manner. For example, the cable in Figure ...
Get Ethernet Networking for the Small Office and Professional Home Office now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
