Chris Trimble

The copper phone wire has very limited bandwidth. It was designed to provide 3,000Hz
bandwidth, perfectly adequate for a voice signal. Fiber links offer over 1,000 times more
bandwidth capacity and can be carried over 100 times the distance than copper can.
The chart pictured here shows the specific advantages Fiber has over copper wiring in regards to
bandwidth and distance.

When it comes to LANs or premises cabling, a lot of controversy, a lot of "positioning" and a lot
of misinformation are talked about by most people who speak on the topic of copper vs. fiber
cabling.
The wire most use for LANs is a lot younger than fiber optics. Fiber use is over 20 years old, but
computer networks on unshielded-twisted-pair cable (UTP) have only been around about 15
years. In that time, UTP has gone through at least 5 generations, each time to keep up with the
incrementing bandwidth requisites of LANs; the ever evolving technology of LAN wire is hardly
the telephone wire that the majority think of it as.

Below is a chart showing the LANs growth in capacity

LAN | Bandwidth
Ethernet

| 10 Mb/s

FDDI | 100 Mb/s

Fast Ethernet | 100 Mb/s

ATM | 55, 155 Mb/s |

Unit 4 Assignment 1 Copper vs Fiber

Chris Trimble

Gigabit Ethernet

| 1,000 Mb/s (1 gigabit/s)

10 Gigabit Ethernet

| 10 Gb/s

But still, even with all the efforts that copper cabling manufactures have made to stay relevant in
todays LAN structuring, installation is a problem that most face if one needs the maximum
performance offered.
A number of magazine articles and even a representative of AMP have been recently quoted as
saying that as much as 80-90% of all Cat 5 cabling was improperly installed and would not
provide the rated performance. Contractors have been quoted as saying that 40% of their Cat 6
installations pass certification tests. It seems that copper cabling used in LAN is preferred when
used in the short distance, and is ideal for wiring a LANs.

Unit 4 Assignment 1 Copper vs Fiber