copper cabling is the foundation of our ethernet networks if you have a network at home you're usually connecting with copper ethernet cable whenever we're building out new networks we need to make sure that we're using the correct type of cable for the type of network that we're installing and of course anything that we're plugging into our network whether it is a copper wired network or a wireless access point will ultimately come back to that wired connection if you were to look inside any of our twisted pair ethernet cables you would see four pairs of wires and you would see that the pairs are twisted around each other these wires are sending equal and opposite signals down both sides of the wires you'll sometimes see this referred to as transmit plus and transmit minus or receive plus and receive minus the reason for sending these opposite signals down the same wires is that we're taking advantage of the twist because the wire is twisted it's always moving away from any noise or interference that may be occurring anywhere close to the cable this allows us to compare those signals on the other end reconstruct what may have been damaged or interfered with during the transmission and be able to properly receive the total signal you also notice that the different pairs have different twist rates which is another way that we could use to be able to reconstruct that signal on the other side there are different ways to construct twisted pair cabling using different types of cables and different ways to manufacture the cable itself these different characteristics of cables are called categories of cables and we use these categories to determine what type of cable we would use for a different type of network for example if you're using 1000 base t the ieee 802.3 standard tells us that we could use category 5 cables to be able to send this gigabit ethernet connection to a maximum distance of 100 meters this category 5 cable is a type of category we no longer use we've updated that category to category 5e the e is for enhanced so when you see 1000 base t being used we're using a minimum of category 5e these days to be able to go 100 meters but if you happen to have some older category 5 that's still in the wall and you would like to send 1000 base t signal over it it'll work great up to 100 meters in length if you're running 10 gig ethernet that's 10g base t you need a minimum of category 6. if you're using unshielded twisted pair cable that supports up to 55 meters in length and shielded cable will support 100 meters in length if you're using category 6a the a means augmented you can still run 10g base t to a distance of 100 meters and if you have category 7 this is a shielded type of cable it will use 10 gbase t for that 10 gigabit ethernet up to a 100 meter distance as well and if your requirements are for 40 gigabit ethernet using the 40g base t standard then you want to use category 8 which is a shielded cable and its maximum supported distance is 30 meters not all cable connections are twisted pair sometimes you may be using coaxial cable coaxial means that you have two or more forms using the same access and in this case it is a single wire conductor that's used in this particular coax cable this is commonly the coax cable we would use for cable modem connectivity for example if you look at the coax that's used inside of your home you can look on the outside of the cable and it's probably labeled to be an rg6 or a similar type of coax this is what we normally use for television our digital cable connectivity and for our digital internet connections this is the type of cable you would commonly use for television and for your cable modem connections twin-x is similar to coax except instead of having one single conductor inside the cable there are two separate conductors the twins in the twin ax this is the type of cable you would commonly see associated with 10 gig ethernet over copper specifically using sfp transceivers this allows for full duplex connection because you do have two connections one for send and one for receive but it does have a limited distance when used with 10 gig ethernet it has a distance of about five meters in length but because it is coax it is a copper cable and has a relatively low cost when you compare it to fiber connectivity especially fiber connectivity on the devices this is also a very efficient copper cable connection with a lower latency than twisted pair cabling one of the things you'll notice if you go from place to place or company to company is that all of their structured cabling all of their ethernet wires and everything that's connected inside of their network is identical from location to location this is by design there are a set of standards that dictate exactly how you should install and use these twisted pair and copper cable connections these are the international iso iec 11801 cabling standards inside of north america you would commonly see the telecommunications industry association standards or the tia standards specifically the ansi tia 568 standard which is the commercial building telecommunications cabling standard if you want more information on the tia you can find it on their website at tiaonline.org the tia 568 standard is extensive but for the purposes of what we'll talk about in this video we're going to talk about the standards associated with pin and pair assignments of 8 conductor 100 ohm balanced twisted pair cabling this is the cable we often use when we're using ethernet networks specifically we're going to talk about two types of standards the t568a and the t568b these 568a and 568b standards dictate what type of colors of cables we will use when punching down these ethernet connections the t568a standard has a different set of colors than the t568b standard but by using either the a or the b standard we can be assured that we're matching an arb standard that's used anywhere else almost universally the standard itself mentions times when you may want to use t568a colors and t568b colors for example it mentions that if you're using horizontal cabling you would probably use t568a but many organizations use 568b normally an organization would pick which standard they're going to follow and then they use that for their entire infrastructure so if you're walking into an organization and you're wondering which standard to follow you simply ask somebody what do you use here do you use 568a or 568b or you could look at their existing cables and see what colors they're currently using there are differences between the t568a and the t568b so it's important that you punch down or use the same standard on both ends of the cable you don't want to use t568a on one side and 568b on the other that creates a lot of confusion and you may find that the cable is not working as expected you may find some documentation that tries to compare the 568 a or b standard with ethernet crossover cables but the 568 a or b standard is not related to ethernet crossover crossover cables are defined in the ieee 802.3 standard and not in the 568 standard we'll go through crossover cables and how this applies to the colors used in crossover cables in a later video here are the colors used for these two standards we're specifically looking at these colors based on the eight wires that are inside of an rj45 connection and you can see they're numbered numbers one through eight for the t568a and 568b you can see that some of the wires are different but some are the same for example pins four and five are blue and white and blue in both standards and pins seven and eight are white and brown and brown in both standards the only two pair that are different between the standards are pins one and two and pins three and six you can see in 568a pins one and 2 are white and green and green and pins 3 and 6 are white and orange and orange in the t568b standard those colors are simply reversed one way to tell what standard is being used in a particular cable is to look very closely at the colors that are along the outside we should be able to map back what each individual color is and make sure that it correlates back to one of the a or b standards in this example we can look at the back of this cable and we can put that b standard right next to it and see that each one of those colors does match up so this particular connector is wired with the t568b standard this would be good to try yourself grab an ethernet cable you have sitting around have a look at the wires that are on the connector and see if yours are wired for t568a or t568b you