On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 3:08 PM, Phil Brutsche <[email protected]> wrote: >> Fiber can go longer still. How long depends on the type and grade >> of fiber. Exact numbers seem to vary by manufacturer. > > a) My experience is that potential fiber distances are fairly standard, > regardless of the manufacturer.
I bow to your experience on this. I haven't really done much in that space. I was looking for max distances once a few years ago; Cisco and HP each had products claiming a certain (different) distance, and only if used with a like transceiver. > b) Do not try to put ethernet on CAT3 unless you are REALLY deperate. It > will *hypothetically* work, but it is out of spec. CAT3 is within spec for 10 megabit. If you force your transceivers to 10 megabit it should work. Note that should != will. There's stuff out there that is non-conforming to the specs -- both cables and hardware. > my work-issued laptop (a Dell Latitude E5500 with integrated Broadcom > gigabit) will not sync up to a Cisco Catalyst 2950-12 switch over CAT3 Ethernet negotiation doesn't do anything about the media[1]; it just involves the transceivers. If both transceivers are gigabit capable, they will likely negotiate to gigabit speed. They then try to run gig over CAT3 and fail miserably. Even if you got link beat, I'd bet you'd see a very high error rate. [1] I vaguely recall reading something about media validation being considered for some rev of the spec; whether that went anywhere or not, I don't know/recall. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to [email protected] with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
