A Fiber Patch Cable Vs Wire CablesIf you've made it this far, you probably know what fiber optics are; but if in case you're not sure, I'll tell you. Regular cables have copper wires inside of them. Electrons transfer the charge; but if electrons actually carried the charge then they would never get the signal there. The reason is, electronics only pass through the wire at centimeter-per-minute. In one minute one electron would only go about 5 inches, depending upon the voltage (force that pushes the electrons) and current (the total number of electrons that are flowing in the wire). A fiber patch cable, on the other hand, passes light through the cable. Light travels the speed of light, of course. Now, even though I said that electrons only travel very slowly in a wire, the EFFECT of a copper cable is that one electron is sort of pushed in one end of the wire, and one falls out at the other end of the wire. That's the image they usually show as to why individual electrons travel very slowly; but the net effect of the electron falling out on the other side is nearly instantaneous. You can sort of think of the cable as being filled with marbles. Each of the marbles touches the next marble, so if you put a marble in one end of the tube, one falls out at the other end even if the tube were miles long.
CAT5 (category 5) cables are used in networking to connect one Ethernet connector to another. As they've developed new needs, that means that they had to redefine how to make a cable to handle the extra speed or capabilities they asked that category to be able to handle. There's also Category 6, which can pass things at a faster connection. A category 5 cable has four 'twisted-pair' copper wires which pass through the cable. By twisting two wires together, it keeps crosstalk down. It's what is oftentimes called 10/100 Ethernet boards because it can handle frequencies up to 100 MHz and speeds that are up to 1000 Mega-bits-per-second (Mbps). If you ever see a capital-B, that means Bytes, if you see a small b, that means bits. So, if something transfers at 100Mbps, that means that more pass through than if it were MBps, which is determined by how many bits-per-byte were being sent. RGY coaxial cable is the most commonly seen, nowadays. RG-59 was common years ago. RG stands for 'Radio Guide'. It uses a coaxial cable consisting of an inner copper wire surrounded by plastic insulation (dielectric is what they call it when it's acting like a capacitor in some form). It's used for both commercial and residential settings. It's also the standard that CATV used when they route home cable televisions inside your house. On the other hand, fiber optics cable is what is used when you're going above a certain frequency. With fiber-optics it's not copper inside the wire any more. You connect one side to a light-source, the other side to a light-detector, and the light then passes around corners because it's really shiny inside the cable. As the light bounces down the cable, it turns when the cable turns because it's bouncing off little mirrored surfaces all along the cable. If you think of it like a long tunnel with mirrored sides and a dog is thrown into the tunnel, if he can only run one way, and that dog can run the speed of light? That's him. So, from now on you'll think of fiber optics and you'll have that image of that dog running as fast as light, bouncing off the walls. If you're needing to go fast on an Ethernet connector, then, you'd have to use a fiber Ethernet cable. A fiber crossover cable is needed when you have two different connectors. Like with RS-232 (serial ports), you have signals that have to have one side be an 'out' on pin one, and on the other side the same pin 1 is an in, not an out. This means that if you want to go from an out to an in, which you have to do, then you can't just use the same connector because you'd end up going in to in. That's not going to allow you to pass a signal. If you're coming from a DTE (Data Terminal Equipment) to a DCE (Data Communications Equipment) then that's what you want. How about if you want to go from a DCE and go to another DCE, though? Then you'd need a crossover cable. Same is true if you're going DTE to DTE. |
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