10Base5: Thick Ethernet
The first implementation is called 10Base5, thick Ethernet, or Thicknet. The nickname derives from the size of the cable, which is roughly the size of a garden hose and too stiff to bend with your hands. 10Base5 was the first Ethernet specification to use a bus topology with an external transceiver (transmitter/receiver) connected via a tap to a thick coaxial cable.
The transceiver is responsible for transmitting, receiving, and detecting collisions. The transceiver is connected to the station via a transceiver cable that provides sepa- rate paths for sending and receiving.
This means that collision can only happen in the coaxial cable.
The maximum length of the coaxial cable must not exceed 500 m, otherwise, there is excessive degradation of the signal. If a length of more than 500 m is needed, up to five segments, each a maximum of 500-meter, can be connected using repeaters.
10Base2: Thin Ethernet
The second implementation is called lOBase2, thin Ethernet, or Cheapernet, 10Base2 also uses a bus topology, but the cable is much thinner and more flexible. The cable can be bent to pass very close to the stations. In this case, the transceiver is normally part of the network interface card (NIC), which is installed inside the station.
Note that the collision here occurs in the thin coaxial cable. This implementation is more cost effective than 10BaseS because thin coaxial cable is less expensive than thick coaxial and the tee connections are much cheaper than taps.
Installation is simpler because the thin coaxial cable is very flexible. However, the length of each segment cannot exceed 185 m (close to 200 m) due to the high level of attenuation in thin coaxial cable.
10 Base-T: Twisted-Pair Ethernet
lOBase-T uses a physical star topology. The stations are connected to a hub via two pairs of twisted cable,
Note that two pairs of twisted cable create two paths (one for sending and one for receiving) between the station and the hub. Any collision here happens in the hub.
Compared to 10 Base 5 or 10 Base 2, we can see that the hub actually replaces the coaxial cable as far as a collision is concerned. The maximum length of the twisted cable here is defined as 100 m, to minimize the effect of attenuation in the twisted cable.
10 Base-F: Fiber Ethernet
Although there are several types of optical fiber 10-Mbps Ethernet, the most common is called 10 Base-F
10 Base-F uses a star topology to connect stations to a hub. The stations are connected to the hub using two fiber-optic cables.
IEEE created Fast Ethernet under the name 802.3u. Fast Ethernet is backward-compatible with Standard Ethernet, but it can transmit data 10 times faster at a rate of 100 Mbps.
Fast Ethernet implementation at the physical layer can be categorized as either two-wire or four-wire. The two-wire implementation can be either category 5 UTP (lOOBase-TX) or fiber-optic cable (lOOBase-FX). The four-wire implementation is designed only for category 3 UTP (100Base-T4).
100 Base-TX : uses two pairs of twisted-pair cable (either category S UTP or STP).
100 Base-FX : uses two pairs of fiber-optic cables. Optical fiber can easily handle high bandwidth requirements by using simple encoding schemes.
100 Base-T4 : A 100 Base-TX network can provide a data rate of 100 Mbps, but it requires the use of category 5 UTP or STP cable. This is not cost-efficient for buildings that have already been wired for voice-grade twisted-pair. 100 Base-T4, was designed to use category 3 or higher UTP. The implementation uses four pairs of UTP for transmitting 100 Mbps.