Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
that produce those competing technologies. It is only natural that they would see
their products as being technologically superior to older methods.
Truth, as often is the case, probably lies between the extremes. There is a cer-
tain philosophical attractiveness to alternatives for copper wire.
The fiber alternative offers a considerable increase in bandwidth, which translates to
an increase in LAN data rates. Unfortunately, it may come at greater cost and more lim-
ited flexibility. No one would argue that it would be difficult to adapt the hub, patch panel,
and workstation outlet to fiber. Fiber has its own set of installation and testing difficulties,
in addition to a higher component expense. Most of your existing networking equipment
would have to be scrapped and replaced with optically interfaced equipment and adapters.
Advantages in one area may be disadvantages in another. For example, the voltage isola-
tion inherent in fiber-optic cabling would make it impossible to centrally power telephone
instruments, so communications could not be maintained in a power outage.
The solution, for the time being, is that fiber has an important place in telecom-
munications systems, but it will not immediately supplant copper wire as the cable
of choice within buildings, if one must choose between the two. Fiber will continue
to provide interbuilding links, links between far-flung hubs, and links needing
greater bandwidth/distance performance than copper can provide.
The wireless alternative is an intriguing one. It eliminates the need for any
direct placement of cable, whether copper or fiber. It is heavily promoted as the
future of networking. However, it has some inherent disadvantages.
The first disadvantage is that it knows no bounds. That means that your net-
work connection signal can travel far beyond your immediate office (even outside
your building). Not only is the signal transmitted where it is not wanted, but the
wireless LAN adapter is also susceptible to outside receive interference. Second, as
more and more wireless devices are placed in close proximity (“close” can be hun-
dreds of meters in distance), more interfering signal clashes occur. Do you remem-
ber the early days of cellular radio, when the service actually met its claims of clear,
interference-free communication from almost anywhere?
The addition of thousands of users has greatly degraded the quality of recep-
tion. The same degradation can happen to crowded wireless LANs, except that the
interference cannot be heard; it simply slows down the network in silence.
The third disadvantage is troubleshooting and management. A direct cable net-
work is easy to manage and repair. With modern hubs, problems in the network
cabling are easily isolated to one station, and monitoring of the process is straight-
forward. Finding a radio-frequency problem in a random, deterministic, virtual net-
work is a much more challenging task. Fourth, wireless networking is more
expensive in relation to direct cabling. Wireless network adapters are still usually
two to four times the cost of copper cabling systems, including the copper adapters.
