Black Box Explains... Standard and ThinNet Ethernet cabling.
The Ethernet standard supports 10-, 100-, and 1000-Mbps speeds. It supports both half- and full-duplex configurations over twisted-pair and fiber cable, as well as half-duplex over coax cable.
However, the Thick and ThinNet Ethernet standards support only 10-Mbps speeds.
Standard (Thick) Ethernet (10BASE5)
• Uses “Thick” coax cable with N-type connectors for a backbone and a transceiver cable with 15-pin connectors from the transceiver to the network interface card.
• The maximum number of segments is five, but only three can have computers attached. The others are for network extension.
• The maximum length of one segment is 500 meters.
• The maximum total length of all segments is 2500 meters.
• The maximum length of one transceiver cable is 50 meters.
• The minimum distance between transceivers is 2.5 meters.
• No more than 100 transceiver connections per segment are allowed. A repeater counts as a station for both segments.
Thin Ethernet (ThinNet) (10BASE2)
• Uses “Thin” coax cable (RG-58A/U or RG-58C/U).
• The maximum length of one segment is 185 meters.
• The maximum number of segments is five.
• The maximum total length of all segments is 925 meters.
• The minimum distance between T-connectors is 0.5 meters.
• No more than 30 connections per segment are allowed.
• T-connectors must be plugged directly into each device.