Answer to Question #296112 in Computer Networks for kitty ku

Question

A new company has three buildings and each building is more than 100 m apart from the other. A backbone network is to be installed to connect the buildings together. A fiber-optic backbone is proposed. (9 marks)

Discuss whether the following results can be achieved by this proposal.

(i) The network must operate at a speed of at least 200 Mbps (3%)

(ii) The network should be secured from eavesdropping (3%)

(iii) The budget should be less expensive than coaxial-cable (3%)

Answer 1

1. A fibre-optic optic backbone infrastructure can provide higher speeds of greater than 200Mbps as it is suitable for high speed networks as it supports a large amount of bandwidth. Also fibre optic will allow more than token ring to be transmitted and each node releases the token as it is being transmitted unlike coaxial cables that require a return token so as to release another token making connection quite unreliable.
2. With the use of fibre-optic for back-bone network installation the network will be secure from eaves dropping since fibre-optic cables are less vulnerable to electromagnetic interference in highly intensive environments.
3. Since fibre-optic cables can reach a larger distance greater than 100m without the use of repeaters. In this case it might be less expensive to implement and more so large amounts of data leaves the backbone to other end networks which fibre-optic is more suitable to handle.

A fibre-optic back-bone system will be most suitable since backbone requires network with higher speeds, that experience less interference as they are responsible for transporting large amounts of data between multiple end networks in most corporations.