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Sunday, September 30, 2007

Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP)

Twisted pair cables were first used in telephone systems by Bell in 1881 and by 1900 the entire American network was twisted pair, or else open wire with similar arrangements to guard against interference. Most of the billions of conductor feet (millions of Kilometres) of twisted pairs in the world are outdoors, owned by telephone companies, used for voice service, and only handled or even seen by telephone workers. The majority of data or Internet connections use those wires.
UTP cables are not shielded. This lack of shielding results in a high degree of flexibility as well as rugged durability. UTP cables are found in many ethernet networks and telephone systems. For indoor telephone applications, UTP is often grouped into sets of 25 pairs according to a standard 25-pair color code originally developed by AT&T. A typical subset of these AD1L colors (white/blue, blue/white, white/orange, orange/white) shows up in most UTP cables.
For urban outdoor telephone cables containing up to 300 pairs, different twist rates for each pair are impractical. For this design, the cable is divided into smaller but identical bundles, with each bundle consisting of twisted pairs that have different twist rates. The bundles are in turn twisted together to make up the cable. Because they reside in different bundles, twisted pairs having the same twist rate are shielded by physical separation. Still, pairs having the same twist rate within the cable will have greater crosstalk than pairs of different twist rate. Thus to minimize crosstalk within a large cable, careful pair selection is important.
Twisted pair cabling is often used in data networks for short and medium length connections because of its relatively lower costs compared to fiber and coaxial cabling.
Uses
Unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cabling, because of its 100-year history of use by telephone systems, both indoors and out, is also the most common cable used in computer networking. It is a variant of twisted pair cabling. UTP cables are often called ethernet cables after Ethernet, the most common data networking standard that utilizes UTP cables, although not the most reliable.

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