Difference between Cable and Wire

Difference between Cable and Wire

I found many eSecurity Professional - sales manager confused about cables & Wires. Fundamentally a wire is a single conductor while cable is a group of two or more conductors.

A cable is usually two or more wires running together or bonded, twisted or braided together. They are usually insulated rather than not, which gives them a better protection than just wires. Cables are mainly used to carry electrical and telecommunications signals.

There are various types of cables, including twisted pair cable, coaxial cable, multi conductor cable and fiber optic cable. A twisted pair cable has two cables twisted around each other and is mainly used to carrying signals. A multi conductor cable is made up of many conductors insulated from each other, and is best suited for control. In a coaxial cable, the signal on the two conductors is not same. This is called an unbalanced line and performance on this cable is more stable than on a twisted pair cable. There are three types of fiber optic cables: 

plastic fiber – used for sending audio, 

multi-mode fiber – used for sending data, and 

single mode fiber – seen only under a microscope and has the best performance. 

There are two main types of wires: solid or stranded. A solid wire is usually a long length of single conductor. A stranded wire is many thin strands of wires twisted together. Solid wires offer low resistance and are perfect for use in higher frequencies, whereas a stranded wire has a longer life, due to its flexibility and can be used for a longer period than a single conductor. Wires are mainly used to carry electrical and telecommunications signals, but can also be used in various other forms, from bearing mechanical loads, to heating, to even in jewelry and clothing. The easiest way to distinguish between the two is that the wire is usually visible, whereas a cable is most usually insulated.

A detailed comparison between wire and cable:-

	Wire	Cable
Definition	Single conductor	Two or more conductors
Uses	To bear mechanical loads, to carry electricity and telecommunications signals, heating, jewelry, clothing, mesh, automotive or industrial manufactured parts, pins, needles, fish hooks, bulbs.	Power transmission, to carry electricity and telecommunications signals.
Types	Solid wire, and stranded wires	Twisted pair cable, coaxial cable, multi conductor cable and fiber optic cable.
Advantages	Solid wires are perfect for use in higher frequencies, offer low resistance. Stranded wire shows higher resistance to metal fatigue.	Higher strength, heavy duty, insulated.

Cable, DSL, 3G or Satellite Broadband?

If you are looking at wireless internet CCTV for the first time, you may also be faced with the decision of which type of broadband package to go for: DSL, cable, 3G or satellite? This article aims to help you choose.

If you have decided that you want to see your property from wherever you happen to be, by using CCTV over the internet, you may also be faced with trying to choose a broadband package if you don’t already have one. There are so many types of broadband on the market that it is a daunting task, but I am here to give you some information that should make this task easier.

Here are the main types of broadband available to the domestic customer:

1. DSL Broadband. (The most common form is ADSL.) This is broadband via your existing phone line.
2. Cable Broadband. This uses the line provided by a cable company.
3. 3G/Mobile Broadband. The connection is made through the mobile phone network.
4. Satellite Broadband. This comes through a satellite dish.

Items three and four are really problematic and not recommended for hosting wireless CCTV cameras. Without going too far into the technical details, these types of broadband often block the ports (the specific addresses) through which you connect to the camera from the internet. If you have no choice but to use one of these two options, be prepared for the fact that your wireless CCTV camera may not be viewable from the internet even after a long process of trial and error, reading forums and spending time on the phone to a helpdesk. For this reason alone, this article is going to focus on comparison between the most popular two types of broadband: cable and DSL.

Broadband speeds and packages are changing all the time, but companies always use the download speed as one of the headline selling points. This is unhelpful when it comes to wireless internet CCTV, because the cameras use mostly upload rather than download capacity, as almost all of a camera’s data traffic is made up of images sent up the line. So, when considering broadband for internet CCTV cameras, you need to dig deeply into the broadband provider’s website until you find the upload speed, and believe me, you will need to dig deeply because the upload speed is usually pitifully unimpressive. In home packages and most small business packages, it is often 10 or even 20 times slower than the download speed. In the next section we’re going to look at some of the numbers.

Cable broadband can in theory have a download speed of up to 30Mbps, but most packages offer something between 1 Mbps and 6 Mbps. On the upload side, cable offers between 128Kbps and 1Mbps. DSL comes in at between 2Mbps and 24Mbps on the download side and between 128Kbps and 1Mbps on the upload. Looking at the upload side of the equation which is what we’re interested in for internet CCTV, you can see that there is no difference between the ranges for cable and DSL. However, there will be a big difference in performance from a package with 128Kbps upload speed compared to one offering 1Mbps. Let’s say your camera produces a series of images that, when viewed one after another, appear as video.

If each of these images is 15Kb in size, the broadband upload speed has the following effect on the number of frames per second or fps:
Upload speed 128Kbps: 1fps
Upload speed 1Mbps: 8fps

This really makes a big difference. Viewing streaming images from an internet CCTV camera at 8fps gives a real approximation of movement, whereas 1fps certainly does not. So, whether you choose cable or DSL, be careful to get the best upload speed that you can.

Pricing for cable and DSL packages is very competitive these days, and as with upload speed, there is no clear winner. Suppliers are bundling in all sorts of other services that makes a direct comparison more complicated. All I can say is that it is definitely worth spending an hour on the internet looking at current offers and taking note of reviews, especially bearing in mind that you may have to sign up for as long as 18 months.

Overall then, for internet CCTV I would rule out 3G broadband and satellite broadband unless you have no other choice, and even then it is a gamble. As for the remaining options, either cable or satellite will work well with wireless CCTV cameras, but please get the very fastest upload speed that you can afford.