Ethernet and Serial technologies

Technology: It serves as a platform for the implementation of innovation.

For communication in Networking, there are two main technologies to focus on:

Ethernet and Serial

Ethernet Technology: Long distance, very high Bandwidth, cheaper in cost.

• Standard: IEEE 802.3 (wired), IEEE 802.11 (wireless)
• Protocol of Ethernet technology: ARPA

Serial Technology: very long distance, high Bandwidth, expensive.

Ethernet variants:

• Ethernet: 10 Mbps
• Fast Ethernet: 100 Mbps
• Gigabit Ethernet: 1000 Mbps
• Ten Gigabit Ethernet: 10,000 Mbps and so on.

Ethernet Mediums:

	Twisted Pair	Thin wire	Thick wire
Range (meters)	100	180-200	500
BW (Mbps)	Upto 1000	10	10

•   When using Cu wire as a medium, signals travel as EM waves and have two parameters: Amplitude and Frequency.
• Frequency accounts for BW while Amplitude accounts for the range (or coverage of the network).
• Clearly, from above table, the restrictions of range-BW duo, limits the communication over Cu.

 Level-3 cascading (using repeaters):

• When signals travel in Cu wire, they get affected by various interferences, which damp the signal’s amplitude.
• To revive our signals, we use repeaters at particular points.
• We can only use repeaters 3 times between two end points, beyond the signal becomes corrupt and cannot be recovered completely.
• This use of repeaters 3 times is called L-3 cascading.

To overcome Cu medium limitation, Light as a medium is used, i.e. optic fibres.

• Light source input to the optical fiber is called Module(e.g. SFP)
• Modules are SX/SH (upto 500m), LX/LH (2 km), ZX/ZH (40km+).

	Multimode	Single mode
Range	500m-2km	>2km
BW	100Mbps/1-10 Gbps	1/10/40 Gbps

>Air as a medium is used for wireless technology.

>Thick and Thin wire medium for preferred for bus topology.

>Twisted pair/Fiber/Air are preferred for star topology.

Serial Technology:

• Covers long distance.
• Low BW compared to Ethernet
• Offers point-to-point communication
• No MAC address required for communication using serial technology.
• The card used in Serial operates at following two standard bandwidths:
  • T1: 1.544 Mbps (followed in US, Canada, Japan)
  • E1: 2.048 Mbps (followed by other countries)