What is Transmission Media?

What is communication?

• Simply we can say, Exchanging data between two or more devices via transmission medium called data communication.

What is transmission media?

• Carrying information from the sender to the receiver is done through transmission media.
• This is a communication channel that can transmit data through electromagnetic signals.
• Exchanging information in the form of bits through a Local Area Network is a major functionality of transmission media.
• In the OSI model, transmission media support the physical layer. Therefore it is called a physical layer component.

How to identify the quality and characteristics of transmission media?

• This can be determined by the medium and signal.
• We can divide transmission media into wired (guided) and wireless media (unguided) based on the medium.
• Medium characteristics will be more important in wired media and signal characteristics will be more important in wireless media.
• Bandwidth, delay, and cost will be different, based on the transmission media.

What are the Causes for Transmission Impairment?

We can identify three causes for transmission impairment.

• Attenuation- Attenuation happens when the energy is decreased. Simply, this means energy loss. When the strength of the signal decreases, the distance will be increased.

• Distortion- Distortion happens when the shape of the signal is changed.

• Noise- Noise happens when an unnecessary signal is added to the original signal. This will create noise.

What is guided media?

In here data transmission is done through a physical medium. Therefore it is also called wired media.

We can categorized guided media as,

1. Twisted pair
2. Coaxial cable
3. Fiber optics

1. Twisted pair

This is a physical media which has made up of a pair of twisted cables.

Shielded Twisted Pair (STP)

What are the advantages of shielded Twisted Pair?

• The cost is average.
• The installation process is very easy.
• These cables have a higher capacity than unshielded pair cables

What are the Disadvantages of shielded Twisted Pair?

• The cost is higher than coaxial cables.
• These cables have a higher attenuation rate.

Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP)

What are the advantages of unshielded Twisted Pair?

• Low cost
• The installation process is easy.

What are the Disadvantages of unshielded Twisted Pair?

• Unshielded cables can only use to transmit data between shorter distances

2. Coaxial cable

• This is a very common use of transmission media.
• This cable contains two conductors.

What are the advantages of Coaxial cable?

• Higher speed
• Better shielding
• Coaxial cables provide the highest bandwidth.

What are the Disadvantages of Coaxial Cable?

• Expensive
• If the cable is damaged, the entire network will fail.

3. Fiber optics

• This cable uses electrical signals for transmitting data.
• There is a plastic coat around optical fibers.

What are the advantages of Fiber Optics?

• Higher bandwidth than coaxial cables
• Higher speed
• Can transmit data to a longer distance.

What is unguided media?

Using unguided media (wireless), we can transmit data through electromagnetic waves.

1. Radio waves

• Using radio waves, we can transmit data through all the directions of free space.
• The range of the frequencies of radio waves will be 3 kHz to 1 kHz.
• FM radio is a well-known example of radio waves.

2. Microwaves

We can identify two types of microwaves. As

1. Terrestrial microwave

2. Satellite microwave

However, transmitting data through microwaves is cheaper than using cables and we can communicate through the ocean using microwaves.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this….