Local Area High Speed Networks

Building a Mixed Coax/Twisted-Pair Collision Domain

The maximum length of a thick Ethernet segment is 500 meters, and a thin Ethernet segment is, at most, 185 meters long. The length of a twisted-pair segment, however, is limited to 100 meters. Figure 6.18 shows what happens when you build a LAN that mixes 10BASE5 coax and twisted-pair segments. The maximum length of each segment is dictated by its medium type.

Figure 6.18. Mixed coax and twisted-pair LAN.

The path from station A to server X passes through four repeaters (three hubs and a coax repeater). It crosses three twisted-pair segments and two coax segments. The thin lines in the ...