October 30, 2015
To deal with the strong demands of utilizing faster media, mounting bandwidth and play "traffic cop†to an ever-growing network infrastructure, there occurred Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet successively. And it is of great importance for network designers to understand basics of Ethernet technologies to manage networks. This article will touch on Fast Ethernet technology, mainly describing its two types of transmission media: copper and fiber optics.
In computer networking, Fast Ethernet is a collective term for a number of Ethernet standards that carry traffic at the nominal rate of 100 Mbit/s (the original Ethernet speed was 10 Mbit/s). It was introduced in 1995 as the IEEE 802.3u standard and remained the fastest version of Ethernet for three years before it was superseded by the Gigabit Ethernet.
Just as its name shows, Fast Ethernet is an extension of the existing Ethernet standard. It is sometimes referred to as 100BASE-X, where "X" is a placeholder for the FX and TX variants. The "100" in the media type designation refers to the transmission speed of 100 Mbit/s, while the "BASE†refers to baseband signaling. The letter following the dash ("T†or "Fâ€) refers to the physical medium that carries the signal (twisted-pair cable or fiber, respectively), while the last character ("X", "4", etc.) refers to the used encoding method., such as 100BASE-T and 100BASE-FX. That is to say, Fast Ethernet runs on unshielded twisted-pair (UTP) cables or optical fiber cables.
100BASE-T—Of all the copper-based Fast Ethernet standards, 100BASE-T is one of the most-commonly used standard and is specified for twisted-pair cables with link lengths up to 100 m (328 ft). Almost all 100BASE-T installations are 100BASE-TX.
100BASE-TX—100BASE-TX is the predominant form of Fast Ethernet. It uses CAT5-rated twisted-pair copper cable to connect various hubs, switches and end-nodes. It also uses an RJ45 jack just like 10BASE-T.
There are also 100BASE-T4 and 100BASE-T2 standardized for copper SFPs (small form-factor pluggable) to operate on UTP.
100BASE-FX—100BASE-FX is a version of Fast Ethernet over optical fiber. It uses a 1300nm near-infrared (NIR) light wavelength transmitted via two strands of optical fiber, one for receive (RX) and the other for transmit (TX). Maximum length is 412 meters (1,350 ft) for half-duplex connections, and 2 kilometers (6,600 ft) for full-duplex over multi-mode fiber (MMF). The 100BASE-FX SFPs, like Fiberstore Cisco GLC-GE-100FX operate on ordinary MMF with link length up to 2 kilometers.
100BASE-SX—100BASE-SX—100BASE-SX is also a version of Fast Ethernet over optical fiber. It uses two strands of multi-mode optical fiber to receive and transmit signal, able to operate at distances up to 550 meters (1,800 ft). Actually, 100BASE-SX is not standardized by the IEEE 802.3 committee. It is an industry de facto standard rather than a formal Ethernet standard.
Fast Ethernet optical standards also include 100BASE-LX10 and 100BASE-BX, which are designed to run over single-mode fibers (SMF).
Fast Ethernet broke through the speed limit from 10 megabits per second to 100Mbps, and tackled the strong demand for high transmission speeds. Fiberstore supplies both 100BASE copper SFPs and optical SFPs for Fast Ethernet transmission, such as 100BASE-FX SFP (Cisco GLC-FE-100FX also included), 100BASE-LX10 SFP, 100BASE-EX SFP, etc. You can visit Fiberstore for more information about 100BASE SFPs for Fast Ethernet transmission.
Posted by: fernxu123 at
04:17 AM
| No Comments
| Add Comment
Post contains 557 words, total size 5 kb.
35 queries taking 0.0642 seconds, 80 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
