Networking Hardware

Cabling :
Cable is the medium that ordinarily connects network devices. Network users have three basic cable choices : coaxial, twisted-pair and fiber-optic. Coaxial and twisted pair cables both use copper wire to conduct the signals, fibre-optic cable uses a glass or plastic conductor. Before the Ethernet standards for unshielded twisted-pair installations were approved in 1992, the majority of LANs used coaxial cable, but a high proportion of subsequent installations have used the more flexible and less costly unshielded twisted-pair medium. the use of fiber optics in local network growing, albeit slowly. Fiber is most often used on the backbone network and is not commonly run to the desktop.
Coaxial Cable : Coaxial cable or coax, has a long history. Remember the cable television in our homes, Broadband transmission uses the same principles as cable TV and runs on coax. Broadband and cable TV takes advantage of coaxial cables ability to transmit many signals at the same time. Each signal is called a channel. Each channel travels along at a different frequency, so it does not interfere with other channels. Coaxial cable provides a higher capacity than the copper or twisted-pair cables. Coax cable has four parts. The inner conductor is a solid metal wire surrounded by insulation. A thin, tubular piece of metal screen surrounds the insulation. Its axis of curvature coincides with that of the inner conductor, hence the name coaxial. Finally an outer plastic cover surrounds the rest.
Coax comes in two sizes. Thick Ethernet and Thin Ethernet. Thicker coax is more robust, harder to damage and transmits data over longer distances. It's also more difficult to connect.
Thin Ethernet uses a biconic ( or BNC) connector which is easer to install.