What are the strengths and weaknesses of coax cable?

Answer 1

Strengths: It is a robust, durable and moderately reliable communication method that is easy to crimp, cut, and install quickly and cheaply. It is more durable than TPC and Fiber Optic cables, and can much more easily be weather-proofed for use outdoors. It also acheives greater range than TPC and some Fiber Optic before the signal must be boosted, making it advantageous for rural or long-distance deployment.

Weaknesses: It is larger than some other solutions and more prone to interference, even when shielded, than fiber optic or ASTPC. It is also limited in communication speed due to copper electroresistance and thus cannot move data as quickly as TPC or Fiber Optic methods. It is also a serial communication method, causing extreme data overhead when deployed in networks with many nodes.

It is much more expensive to deploy than TPC when hardware costs are involved, as coaxial modems, splitters and routers are much more expensive (due to increased complexity requirements) than TPC, but is cheaper than Fiber Optic. Coaxial cable also tends to require a translation layer or layers to convert to standard TCP/IP for computers, adding an extra layer of overhead, complexity, and hardware expense.

Coaxial typically has higher latency than TPC over the same distance.

Answer 2

Coax cable (both thin and thick) are outdated technologies and are not used in modern network designs. 10base2 and 10base5 relied heavily on coax cable. on the one hand, coax is thick, well insulated, and pretty tough. on the other hand, it can break (it's not that flexible) and once that happens the older style ethernet networks would be down. 10base-t is the current standard. Through online video tutorials, you can learn more about cabling.