Coaxial Cable

Cable networking is usually seen in residential areas, and competes heavily with copper cables. Different providers offer different services, and often DSL connections (that use copper cables) are seen as slower and therefore cable (co-axial) connections are often preferred to DSL connections.

Often the ISPs will offer a service with around 2-10mb speeds, however, often business users can obtain speeds of up to 50mbps. In order to use a cable internet connection the customer must have a cable modem, a cable modem basically provides the customer with access to the digital data that is sent over the cable connection.

Copper cable

Copper cable is the standard wire that is fed into houses all over the country. It is also the standard telephone wire which voice is sent along. They typically run from a building to the nearest telephone exchange where the signals are sent from. Usually the telephone wire will be used rather than a co-axial cable as they are already in the ground and are standard to every house in England.

The speed of the connection actually depends on the distance from the exchange and where you reside or where your business is. Often there are complaints from customers who live quite a distance from the exchanges about their internet connection speed not being as fast as it should be. There is little that can be done about the speed loss issue as when the data is being transferred as the further it has to go the slower your connection is.

Optical Fibres

Optical fibres are often used as a means of communication for networks and the like. The fibres basically carry the light that it sent through it which ultimately carries the information to the final destination. They are quite useful as they can be easily grouped together as they're extremely flexible and therefore are able to be fed to their destination with relative easy, although this does depend on the location.

Optical fibres are a preferred option due to the fact that they have a high bandwidth and can reach rates as high as 40 GB/s, which for transferring data is some speed. The only issue with using optical fibres is that they can be very costly to implement. Fibres can cause issues with regard to laying them in the road and sometimes it just isn't remotely feasible to do this therefore copper is often used as that it standard at this moment in time. It is very complex and very expensive so they are often used for long distance communication, where the transfer speeds are necessary.

Fibre optics are now becoming very popular and could be close to replacing the much used copper cable, although this could be some time down the line due to the complexity of implementing optical fibre cabling.