This is the specification that governs the physical connector on either end of an Ethernet wire. Terms like Ethernet, Twisted Pair, RJ45, Shielded, and Unshielded.īut what do each of these terms mean? How are they different from one another? Are any of these terms being misused? To put it bluntly, yes – these terms are often misused.

If you’ve been around the networking world for even a short duration, you’ve heard lots of terms that are thrown around referring to cabling. We’ll start off with a disambiguation of all the terminology that gets thrown around when discussing physical cabling, then answer a couple basic questions: Why do we need crossover cables vs straight-through? What exactly is Twisted Pair? How is a single bit transmitted across the wire? Finally, we’ll wrap things up with a look at the standard for Gigabit Ethernet. But in light of our mission statement, we thought the topic of Ethernet Wiring deserved a bit more depth. Initially, this article was meant to just cover the basic differences and use-cases for Crossover cables and Straight-through cables. It also determines how to interpret those bits into meaningful frames. It describes how to send bits (1s and 0s) across each wire. Ethernet is a family of specifications that governs a few different things: It covers all the different wiring specifications (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T, etc…).

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