Question

Explain the types of network cables.

Answer 1

There are many types of cables available in networking. Here we discuss six different cables.

• Coaxial Cables:

1. This cable is used to connect the television sets to home antennas and transfer the information in 10 Mbps,
2. It is divided into thinnet and thicknet cables.
3. These cables have a copper wire inside and insulation Is covered on the top of the copper wire to provide protection to the cable.
4. These cables are very difficult to install and maintain because they are too big to carry and replace.
5. The coaxial cable got its name by the word “coax”. Nowadays coaxial cables are also used for dish TV where the setup box and the television is connected using the coaxial cable only.
6. Some of the cable names are Media Bridge 50-feet Coaxial cable, Amazon basics CL2- Rated Coaxial cables, etc.

• Twisted Pair Cables:

1. It is type of cable with two or more insulated wires twisted together.
2. It started with a speed of 10 Mbps (10BASE-T cable is used).
3. Then the cable is improved and the speed was higher and went to 100 Mbps and the cable was renamed 100BASE-TX.
4. Then finally the cable improved more made to 10 Gbps and named as 10GBASE-T.
5. This twisted cable has 8 wires which are twisted to ignore electromagnetic interference.
6. Also, the eight wires cannot be placed in a single unit there could be a difficulty in spacious, so it is twisted to make as one wire.
7. There are two types of twisted pair cables, Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) and Shielded Twisted pair (STP).
8. The UTP is used nowadays as modern cables for the Internet and they are lower in cost and installation and maintenance is easy compared to the coaxial cables.
9. STP is similar to UTP, but it is covered by an additional jacket to protect the wires from External interference.

• Fiber Optics:

1. This cable is different from the other two cables.
2. The other two cables had an insulating material on the outside and the conducting material like copper inside.
3. But in this cable it is of strands of glass and pulse of light is used to send the information.
4. They are mainly used in Wide Area Network (WAN)/The WAN Is a network that extends to a very large distance to connect the computers,

• Ethernet Cables:

1. Ethernet cable is the most common type of network cable mainly used for connecting the computers or devices at home or office.
2. This cable connects wired devices within the local area network (LAN) for sharing the resources and accessing the Internet.