Transmission Data

Coax Coaxial cable can be cabled over longer distances than twisted-pair cable. To put this into perspective Ethernet cables can run around 100 meters whereas Coaxial cables can run up 500m which is 1640 feet. The average data rate of technology that uses Coaxial cable is around 45 Mbps. Coax cables are quite commonly used for wide range transmissions for televisions.

CAT5e (STP & UTP) Cat5e also known as Category 5 enhanced cabling is an improvement of Cat5 cabling. Cat5e cabling was made to support the data rate of 1000Mbps (1Gbps) which is much faster than the original Cat5 but Cat5 has an average speed of 100Mbps. It also cut down on crosstalk. The maximum length of Cat5e cabling is only 100 meters (328 feet) which is much smaller than Coax. Cat5e is highly used for Ethernet purposes because of its very high data rates but not always used in this sense because of its low range of cabling. In sense of STP & UTP (shielded/unshielded twisted pair), these are the two types of cat5 cabling you can get, having STP will negate the effects of electrical interference allowing data to transmit smoothly.

Bluetooth & WiFi Class 1 Bluetooth devices transmit at 100mW which normally have approximately 100 meters range to them (328 feet). Bluetooth 4.0 & 3.0 promises speed similar to each other which is up to 25Mbps which is fairly low. Bluetooth 4.0 uses the 802.11 networking standard. The data rates of some WiFi Protocols can vary, for example; 802.11g has a frequency of 2.4GHz and a data rate of 54Mbps, 802.11n can have 2.4/5GHz and a theoretical data rate of 600Mbps, however the latest protocol 802.11ac has a frequency of 5GHz and double the data rate of 802.11n at a staggering 1.3Gbps. The range of WiFi can be altered by the location of where it is but on average someone using 802.11n will have around 32 meters (105 feet)

Fibre Optic Single mode fibre optic cable has a distance of up to 3km which compared to any other cabling is a ginormous increase. Single mode also will deliver data rates of up to 10Gbps with a bandwidth of 20Ghz. On the other hand Multi mode fibre can only reach distances under 2km and only delivers data rates of about 1Gbps. The operating wavelengths of single mode are 1310 nm & 1550 nm whereas multimode wavelengths are 850 nm & 1300 nm.

Satellite & Microwave Radio transmission products offer full-duplex data rates up to 1.25 Gbps Microwaves have a range that will constantly keep going until it hits a radio tower to transmit the data or if it hits another object like terrain where the signal would be lost. A satellite broadband provider like broadband 25 has data rates of about 22Mbps downstream and 6Mbps upstream. The range of which satellites transmit depends on their altitude.

Infrared Newly developed infrared modules produced by Frank Deicke boasts a data transfer rate of 1 gigabit a second which is about 46 times faster than Wi-Fi and 1,430 times faster than Bluetooth. The ranges of Infrared can seriously vary, it can range from 1mm up to 40km away using specific tools and equipment to produce the long wavelength.