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Transmission Media & Types

Transmission media are necessary to form a network, as they are the physical paths between a
transmitter and a receiver. In telecommunications, a transmission medium/media/channel is
a physical connection or an interface between the transmitter and the receiver. There are two major
categories of transmission media, namely guided and unguided (or wireless).

Different types of guided transmission media

1. Twisted Pair Cable

Twisted pair cables have been around for a long time. They were mainly invented for voice
transmissions. Twisted pair is a widely used medium in networking because it's lighter, cheaper,
more flexible, easy to install, and provides greater speeds than coaxial cables.

There are two types of twisted pair cables: the unshielded twisted pair (UTP) and the
shielded twisted pair (STP).

The unshielded twisted pair

cable has 4 pairs of copper wires
that are present inside a plastic
sheath.
These wires are twisted to protect
them from interference. The only
protection available for a UTP
cable is a plastic sheath that is
thin in size.

The shielded twisted pair cable is widely used

in high-speed networks. The major difference
between UTP and shielded twisted pair is that STP
makes use of a metallic shield to wrap the wires.
This metallic shield prevents interference to a
better extent than UTP.
These STP cables come with numbering; the
higher the numbering, the better the interference
prevention.

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2. Coaxial Cables
The second transmission medium to be introduced
was coaxial cable (often called coax), which began
being deployed in telephony networks around the
mid-1920s.

The coaxial cables have a central copper

conductor, surrounded by an insulating layer, a
conducting shield, and the outermost plastic
sheath. Thus, there are three insulation layers for
the inner copper cable. In the center of a coaxial
cable is a copper wire that acts as the conductor,
where the information travels.

Braided shielding is a type of shielded cable that uses a tightly woven lattice of thin tin or copper wires
to encapsulate a shielded cable assembly. The formation looks like a braid and provides a low-
resistance path to ground.
There are two basic modes of data transmission in coaxial cables: baseband mode that has dedicated
bandwidth, and broadband mode that has distributed cable bandwidth.

Cable TV and analog televisions mainly use coaxial cables. Coaxial cables have better
resistance to cross talk than twisted pair cables. The coaxial cables are used for long distance
communication. The most widely used types of coaxial cables are RG-59 and RG-6 (RG stands for
'radio guide'). RG-59 has lesser shielding and is suitable for short cable lengths an d cable TV
connections.

RG-6 has better insulation than RG-59 and is used for satellite TV and digital signal transmissions
for better strength and longer distances.

The copper wire in coax is thicker than that in twisted-pair, and it is also unaffected by
surrounding wires that contribute to EMI, so it can provide a higher transmission rate than
twisted-pair.

The center conductor is surrounded by plastic insulation, which helps filter out extraneous
interference. The insulation is covered by the return path, which is usually braided-copper
shielding or aluminum foil–type covering.

Coax affords a great deal more frequency spectrum than does twisted-pair. Traditional
coaxial cable television networks generally support 370MHz. Newer deployments, such as hybrid
fiber coax (HFC) architectures, support 750MHz or 1,000MHz systems.

So, there are many advantages to coaxial cables, including the following:

 High bandwidth, greater channel capacity

 Easy and cheap installation
 Lower error rates

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  Better immunity from noise
 Greater spacing between amplifiers—Coax’s cable shielding reduces noise and crosstalk, which means
amplifiers can be spaced farther apart than with twisted-pair

However, there are also a number of disadvantages to coaxial cables, which include the following:

 They're more prone to lightning strikes.

 They cover less distance than fiber optic cables.
 They carry less bandwidth than both fiber optic and twisted pair cables.

3. Optical Fibers
Optical fibers use light waves for transmission.
Crosstalk, EMI, and attenuation aren't issues with
optical fibers. These cables are well-suited for voice,
data, and video transmissions. Optical fibers are the
most secure of all the cable media. Installation and
maintenance are difficult and costly.

Fiber optic cables have greater transmission speed,

high bandwidth, and the signal can travel longer
distances when compared to coaxial and twisted pair
cables.

Though the cost of optical fiber cable is less compared to co-axial and twisted pair cables, the
additional optical components needed for installation make fiber optic the costliest of all the cables.

Optical fiber cable structure and signal propagation

Fiber optics operates in the visible light spectrum, in the range from 1014Hz to 1015Hz.

The EIA/TIA standards currently support three wavelengths for fiber-optic transmission: 850, 1,300,
and 1,550 nanometers (nm). Each of these bands is about 200 nm wide and offers about 25THz of
capacity.

There are two modes of operation for optical fibers. First there's single-mode fiber, which uses
a single beam of light and allows communication over great distances with better transfer speed.
Then there is multimode fiber (two type step-index and graded-index), which uses multiple

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light beams inside a single fiber cable, has a reduced length and travel speed, and has a larger
bandwidth, but signal strength is weakened.

With fiber, today we can space repeaters about 500 miles (800 km) apart, but new developments
continue to increase the distance or spacing. Trials have been successfully completed at distances
of 2,500 miles (4,000 km) and 4,000 miles (6,400 km).

The two factors that determine the performance characteristics of a given fiber implementation are
the type of cable used and the type of light source (light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser
diodes) used.

Applications of Fiber Optics

Fiber has a number of key applications. It is used in both public and private network backbones, so the vast
majority of the backbones of the PSTNs worldwide have been upgraded to fiber. The backbones of Internet
providers are fiber. Cable TV systems and power utilities have reengineered and upgraded their backbones to
fiber as well.

The advantages of optical fibers include the following:

 Extremely high bandwidth and high speed—Fiber offers far more bandwidth than any other cable-based
medium
 Not susceptible to electromagnetic impairments or interference—Because fiber is not susceptible to
electromagnetic impairments or interference, it has a very low bit error rate, 10 –13, which means fiber-optic
transmissions are virtually noise free.
 High secure transmission and early detection—By constantly monitoring an optical network and measuring
the time of light reflection, you can detect splices in the cable.
 Low in weight and mass—Because fiber is low in weight and mass, much less human installation power is
needed than with traditional copper cable or coax bundles

There also are a number of disadvantages, including the following:

 High installation costs—Fiber installation is still relatively costly, although the cost has been dropping by
about 60% per year, depending on the components.
 Very difficult to maintain. Special test equipment required—When you start putting in fiber, you have to
acquire specialized test equipment because none of the test equipment you use on an electrical network will
work with fiber. You need an OTDR (Optical Time-Domain Reflectometer), and when you get into more
sophisticated optical networks, you need highly specialized optical probes that can be quite costly—and you
need one at each location.

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Different types Unguided or wireless transmission media

1. Wireless or Unguided Transmission Media

The features of wireless/unguided transmission media are that the signal gets broadcast without
any guided medium through the air and is less secure. There are three types of wireless transmission
media:

 Radio wave  Infrared  Microwave

In the electromagnetic spectrum, all omnidirectional waves in the frequencies 3KHz to 1GHz are
called radio waves. They are widely used for communications since they are easy to generate,
can travel long distances and can penetrate buildings.

In the electromagnetic spectrum, waves within the frequencies 1GHz to 300GHz are called
microwaves. Microwave is a line-of-sight wireless communication technology that uses high
frequency beams of radio waves to provide high speed wireless connections that can send and
receive voice, video, and data information.

Microwaves are widely used for point-to-point communications because their small wavelength
allows conveniently-sized antennas to direct them in narrow beams, which can be pointed directly
at the receiving antenna. This allows nearby microwave equipment to use the same frequencies
without interfering with each other, as lower frequency radio waves do. Another advantage is that
the high frequency of microwaves gives the microwave band a very large information-carrying
capacity; the microwave band has a bandwidth 30 times that of all the rest of the radio spectrum
below it. A disadvantage is that microwaves are limited to line of sight propagation; they cannot
pass around hills or mountains as lower frequency radio waves can.

Some of the devices used for wireless communication are cordless telephones, mobiles, GPS units,
wireless computer parts, and satellite television.

The advantages of unguided transmission media include the following:

 They are useful in wireless remote accessing methods.

 Networks can be expanded without disturbing the current users.

The disadvantages include:

 Potential security issues.

 They have limited speed compared to guided transmission media.

Network Connectors (Additional)

The cable connector is a physical interface that connects the cables
(media) to devices. The electrical connectors have both jacks (female-
ended) and plugs (male-ended). The female connectors always fit into
the male connectors.

Male and Female Connectors

Different types of Connectors

RJ-45

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RJ-45 is a standard connector used for UTP cabling. It resembles ordinary
telephone jacks (RJ-11). An RJ-45 slot is constructed such that it can only be
inserted one way. RJ, or Registered Jack, implies clearly that this standard is
borrowed from the telephony industry. This connector is larger in size and is also
known as a data jack.

USB
USB, or Universal Serial Bus, is a connector designed for eliminating the
majority of guesswork while connecting a peripheral to a PC. USB is meant
to replace parallel and serial ports. One USB port is capable of connecting
to a maximum of 127 peripheral devices, like modems, mice, keyboards,
printers, digital cameras, scanners, etc. Plug-and-Play and hot plugging are
also supported by USB.

RJ-11
RJ-11 is a standard telephone cable connector with four wires (RJ-12 has 6
wires). RJ-11 is mainly used for connecting telephone equipment.

F-Type
F-type connectors are coaxial cable connectors that are used for cable
television, cable modems, and satellite television connections. F-type
connectors are cost-effective, threaded, and gendered as male and female.
The female F-connector has a socket and external threads, whereas the male
connector has a central pin and internal threads.

SC & ST
SC and ST are used to connect fiber optic cable to network devices. SC
denotes ''Subscriber Connector'' and ST denotes ''Straight Tip''. The SC
connectors come with a push and pull locking feature. SC connectors are
commonly used in telephony, data communication, and CATV. ST is a
high-performance optic fiber connector with a bayonet lock feature. ST
connectors are more widely used than SC connectors in networking
applications. SC and ST connectors can either be simplex or duplex, and
they can be used in both single-mode and multi-mode fiber optic cables.

Fiber LC
LC (Lucent Connector) is a miniature form of SC connector. LC became less
successful because of its high license fees. The LC locking tab has a small ferrule
as opposed to the locking tab of SC. LC is widely used in high density applications
and data communications.

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MT-RJ
MT-RJ (Mechanical Transfer Registered Jack) connectors are also used with
multimode and single-mode fiber optic cables. These connectors have a plastic
housing. Their plastic ferrules and metal guide pins give them accurate
alignment. These connectors are used mainly for gigabit ethernet.

Lesson Summary
Transmission media acts a physical interface for communication in networks. There are two types
of transmission media, namely guided and unguided. Guided transmission media are cables like
twisted pair cables, coaxial cables, and fiber optic cables. Unguided transmission media are
wireless, such as infrared, radio waves, and microwaves. Connectors are used to connect the media
with networking devices, and they are specific for each transmission medium. For example, RJ-45
connectors are used in twisted pair cables, F-type connectors for coaxial cables, and MT-RJ, LC, SC,
and ST connectors are used for fiber optic cables.