Eureka! is a telephone and Internet-based concierge service that specializes in

Question

Eureka! is a telephone and Internet-based concierge service that specializes in obtaining things that are hard to find

(e.g., Super Bowl tickets, first-edition books from the 1500s, Faberge eggs)

It currently employees 60 staff members who work 24 hours per day (over 3 shifts) Staff members answer phone calls and respond to requests entered on the Eureka! website.

Currently, each staff member has a desktop PC with two monitors and a twisted pair connection (Cat5e) that offers speeds up to 100Mbps.

Some employees made a suggestion to the CEO of Eureka! to upgrade their connection to a fiber-obtic cable that can provide speeds up to 1Gbps.

What do you think about this idea?

How easy (difficult) is it to change wiring from twisted pair to fiber optic?

Can we use the same network cards in the PCs, or do we need to change them? How much would this change cost?

Please provide answer in detail, thanks!

Explanation / Answer

Twisted Pair

Advantages :

1. Cheaper and far easier to splice
2. Less susceptible to electrical interference caused by nearby equipment or wires.
3. In turn are less likely to cause interference themselves.
4. Because it is electrically "cleaner", STP wire can carry data at a faster speed.

Disadvantages :

1. STP wire is that it is physically larger and more expensive than twisted pair wire.
2. STP is more difficult to connect to a terminating block.

Fiber Optic

Advantages :

1. One single mode fiber can replace a metal of time larger and heavier.
2. Multi-mode optical cable has a larger diameter and can be used to carry signal over short distance.

Disadvantages :

1. Fiber optic versus metal cable is that it is difficult to make connections to fiber optic cable.
2. The optical fiber must be highly polished to allow light to pass with little loss.

The telcos and CATV companies use fiber optics because of economics. It's greater bandwidth and lower attenuation allow longer distances and more channels (voice or video) per fiber pair. Typical fiber specs are more than 100 times farther and 1000+ times faster. Fiber's "speed" is not referring to the speed of the signal in the fiber, but the bandwidth potential of the fiber.

"Fiber to the desktop" has become a catchphrase for the computing industry. As transmission speeds increase to accommodate the bandwidth-hungry applications and multimedia data streams that are common on today's intranets, fiber-optic network cards allow direct connections to high-speed fiber-optic networks. These cards have recently become cost-competitive, and it's expected that their use will someday be commonplace.

Fibre optic cabling is particularly suited to links between distributors (central link between several buildings, known as backbone) as it allows connections over long distances (from several kilometres to 60 km in the case of single-mode fibre) without requiring earthing. Furthermore, this type of cable is very secure as it is extremely difficult to tap in to such a cable.
However, despite its mechanical flexibility, this cable type is not suitable for local network connections as it is difficult to install and is very expensive. For this reason, twisted pair or coaxial cable are preferred for short links.

fiber cable has the fastest network speed capabilities

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