Saturday, June 18, 2011

Cable standards in networking

Cable standards in networking

One of the benefits of learning networking is that there are a lot of defined standards. This allows equipment from multiple vendors to work together without problems brought by proprietary platforms.

Network cables also come in standard specifications. You can purchase a 10BASE-T cable from five different manufacturers and each one will work with your equipment without a problem.
In this section, you will learn:
  • Standard copper and fibber optic cables;
  • Characteristics of cable standards;
Characteristics of the cable standards:
  • 10BASE-T and 10BASE-FL
  • 100BASE-TX and 100BASE-FX
  • 1000BASE-T, 1000BASE-CX, 1000BASE-SX and 1000BASE-LX
  • 10 GBASE-SR, 10 GBASE-LR and 10 GBASE-ER
10BASE-T Cable Standard

10Base-T is one of the Ethernet standards for cabling in a network environment. 10BaseT uses a twisted pair cable with a maximum length of 100 meters. Standard 10BaseT operates at 10 Mbps. It is commonly used in a star topology.

10BASE-FL Cable Standard

10BaseFL is a fibber optic cable standard designed to run at 10 Mbps. It is similar to 10Base-T, though the media type is fibber. For use up to 2000 meters.

100BASE-TX Cable Standard

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet over category 5 twisted pair cable. Maximum cable length of 100 meters.

100BASE-FX Cable Standard

100 Mbps Fast Ethernet standard over fibber cable. Can transmit data up to 2000 meters.

1000BASE-T Cable Standard

Gigabit Ethernet over twisted pair copper wires. Transmit up to 1000 Mbps. 100 meter maximum cable length. Cat5 or better required (Cat6 cabling recommended).

1000BASE-CX Cable Standard

Gigabit Ethernet over a special copper twinax cable. Up to 25 meters in length. Typically used in a wiring closet or data center as a short jumper cable.

1000BASE-SX Cable Standard

Gigabit Ethernet using a short-wavelength laser device over multimode fibber optic cable. 50 µm core (max 300 meters) or 62.5 µm core (max 500 meters). 1000Mbps maximum transfer speed.

1000BASE-LX Cable Standard

Gigabit Ethernet using long-wavelength laser transmitters over fibber optic cable. Up to 3,000 meters. Uses single mode fibber and requires SC connectors for terminating the cable.

10 GBASE-SR Cable Standard

802.3ae standard. 33 meters for 62.5µm fibber optic cable, 300 meters for 50µm cables. 10 Gbps (Gigabit per second) transfer rate.

10 GBASE-LR Standard

10 Gbps transfer rate. 10 kilometres maximum distance. Fibber optic cable.

10 GBASE-ER Standard

10 Gbps transfer rate. 40 kilometres maximum cable length. Fibber optic cable.




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