Let’s talk a bit about cabling. In particular, twisted-pair copper versus Fibre. One of touted benefits of Fibre cables over Twisted-pair is that you cannot eavesdrop on the data communications. However, again, forget about confidentiality. The data can still be captured from the end-points; from switches and routers. No, if you can afford the cost, the benefits of Fibre is that it is fast and that it fails cleanly.
Fibre natively supports 1 Gbps transfer speeds. 1 Gbps has been achieved with CAT5, however, the frequencies needed exceed the cable’s ratings. Put another way, it may be possible to get close to 1 Gbps on Twisted-pair but the network will be dropping packets. This means data integrity issues. So best to stick with 100 Mbps on CAT5.
Fibre also fails cleanly which, at first, might not look like a benefit. Twisted-pair can be physically damaged and yet continue transmitting traffic. This results in sporadic problems like corrupted communications, network drops, or poor performance. These are difficult to reproduce and time consuming to repair. It might take days before the bad cable is identified. Fibre, when physically damaged, stops transmitting altogether. This is immediately noticed and therefore can be quickly identified and replaced.
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