Think of your car radio. When you leave the city for the country, you leave the familiar stations programmed into your radio. If you could build an extremely sensitive antenna and mount it on your car, you could minimize this problem. And this limitation impacts networks by limiting the distance computers can be placed from one another. If your network uses fiber optical cable, your network resources can stretch for several kilometers.
Copper wire is generally limited to a few hundred meters.
To find out how IBM Global Services can help you run the cable for your network, visit their connectivity Web site. The links in the glossary list will take you to related IBM Networking products. ATM relies on hardware to break down data into relatively small cells of 53 bytes and secure a virtual channel to enable a direct transfer of data between sending and receiving machines. An Ethernet network can use several types of cabling, from low-cost twisted copper wire typical of a regular telephone transmission to more expensive optical fiber. Workstations on an Ethernet network transmit data by sending frames, or chunks of data, out to each station on the network.