Physical Characteristics of Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet has been implemented on multimode fiber optic cable, single-mode fiber optic cable, short shielded cables, and unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) cable. See Tabel 9.1 lists the cable length ranges for a variety of gigabit transmission options.

Note that all the short wavelength (SX) implementations and all but one of the long wavelength (LX) implementations, run on multimode fiber. One LX implementation and all LH implementations require single-mode fiber.

The reason that there are several multimode SX and LX entries in the table is that the length of the multimode cable that can be used depends on a cable parameter called the modal bandwidth. The modal bandwidth affects the capability ...

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