Deciding on the LAN Cables

This part sounds strange at first, but hear me out. The first step in creating a network is choosing the type of network cable your computers need. And, the type of cable you need depends on how much you can spend and where your PCs are located throughout your room.

See, PCs can be connected by one long cable that stretches from PC to PC (Bus Topology, see my article: 'LANing'). Or, they can be connected in a spider-like configuration, where PC gets its own 'leg' of cable (Star Topology).

Look and draw at the way your own PCs are arranged and try to picture which setup would be easier -- stringing a single cable from PC to PC (Bus), or setting a 'hub' in the middle of your PCs and connecting a separate cable from the hub to each PC (Star).

Each of these two setups uses a different type of cable, and two types of cable have weird names:

1. Thin Coax (Thin-Ethernet), and
2. 10Base-T (which supports 10 Mega Bits Per Second speed of data transfer -- there is a new trend in using 10BaseT, which is called '100BaseX' which is an enhanced version of 10BaseT, and supports 100 Mega Bits Per Second).

Thin Coax (Thin-Ethernet):

If you prefer to set up the PCs with a single cable, you need to use cable called Thin Coax. This is a type of Coaxial cable, it is 0.25 inches wide, and supports 10 mega bits per second of data transfer. This cable looks sort of like cable-TV wire, and it runs from computer to computer, creating a long 'backbone' with PCs latched onto it like ribs.

The Thin Coax cable is also known by a variety of other names, for instance; Thin-Ethernet, Thinnet, BNC-class LAN. More technically, it has a dedicated name by IEEE standard 802.3: "10Base2", where '10' is data transfer speed (10mbps), 'Base' is the way of transmission (Baseband), and '2' is a type of cable (0.25 inch wide coaxial).

10BaseT (Twisted-Pair LAN):

If you'd do less tripping over cables by using the 'spider' approach, you should opt for the 10BaseT cable. Resembling telephone cable, this cable works better where computers will be moved around a lot, like in modular office settings. Because each computer gets its own cable that plugs into a central hub, moving a computer to a different location is no big deal -- you're not trying to bend a 'backbone' of linked computers.

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