5. Wiring techniques

Cabling (see table 1 ) is the physical medium linking the various LAN components. As mentioned above, it accounts for the lion's share of the cost of the system (not just the network, but often the entire corporate IT installation), mainly due to installation costs. In a sense, LANs exist to solve an essentially cabling problem. Such is the importance of this part of the local network that today, the necessary infrastructure sometimes precedes the decision to install the network itself. This is known as a pre-wired building. In general, this pre-wiring is done without needing to know the type of local area network to be installed, and can therefore be adapted to different types of network. In other words, today it's reasonable to set up an infrastructure capable of...