Computer

If fiber optics arrives at my house, why is the cable from my PC to the router made of copper?

The first thing one might think is that it makes no sense for fiber optics to reach our home and for the communication mechanism between our router and the PC to be a set of eight copper wires. But, the truth is that this design is still more than enough in the domestic environment.

A technology that, for the moment, stands the test of time

Although it may seem old using four-pair copper Ethernet cable, it was actually a great advance. The first solution the development Xerox in 1973 and it was a coax ethernet cable, similar to that of the television antenna. Those first cables were rigid and later a more flexible variant was developed, but also very limited.

It was in 1989 when the first developed Ethernet cable based on copper wires. This is where the four-pair copper Ethernet cable was first introduced. For this first system, only two of the four pairs transmitted data to a maximum speed of 10Mb/s.

coaxial cable internet

The first of the great jumps came in 2001 with the Category 5e and that he endured 1000MB/s and in 2002 the Category 6which improved the frequency of work and maintained the transfer speed.

We jump to 2009 when the Category 6A that allowed speeds of up to 10Gb/s at a frequency of 500 MHz. It was in 2010 when the Category 7 10 Gb/s @ 600 MHz and the Category 7A 10 Gb/s @ 1 GHz. The most recent is Category 8 introduced in 2016 that supports up to 40Gb/s at a frequency of 2 GHz.

Currently the home network cards support between 1 Gb/s and 2.5 Gb/s. For these two cases, category 6A cables are more than enough, even some Category 6 cables would be compatible.

copper ethernet cable

Well, there are three reasons to continue using copper pairs

The first of the reasons is he economic. Although the price of optical fiber has dropped a lot due to the increased use and improvement of technology, it is quite more expensive than ethernet cable of pairs coppermade.

As a second reason for not using the cables of optical fiberis the creation cost. We mean that the tools to create the fiber optic cables are significantly more expensive than those of copper cables. One of the reasons is that the cables of optical fiber require a very precise and exact cut.

fiber optic cable

Finally, as a last reason we have to Fiber optic cables are extremely delicate. If such a cable it bends in excess or take a hitsuch as fitting between the wall and the desk, i could break it and stop working. The mechanical resistance of copper wires is much higher.

These are the three main reasons why the copper pair system is still maintained. It seems difficult, at the moment, to change it, since there are no technical reasons for such a change. Note that fiber optics is used in Data Centers and large-scale computing systems where the high bandwidth and speed it offers offsets the cost. At the domestic level, using fiber optic cable is not an improvement over the copper pair.

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