Summary of Cable Characteristics

Summary of Cable Characteristics

Table 3.2 summarizes the characteristics of the four cable types discussed in this section.

When comparing cabling types, remember that the characteristics you observe depend highly on the implementations. Engineers once thought that UTP cable would never reliably support data rates above 4 Mbps, but 100 Mbps data rates now are common.

Some comparisons between cable types are fairly involved. For example, although fiber-optic cable is costly on a per-foot basis, you can construct a fiber-optic cable that is many kilometers in length. To build a copper cable many kilometers in length, you need to install repeaters at several points along the cable to am-plify the signal. These repeaters could easily exceed the cost of a fiber-optic cable run.