100Base-TX Ethernet Media Standard

FastEthernet is defined as IEEE 802.3u standard.

100Base-TX is an Ethernet networking standard (IEEE 802.3u standard.) that supports up to 100 Mbps transfer speed. 100Base-TX was also called as FastEthernet, because Ethernet was 10 Mbps that time and FastEthernet was faster than Ethernet. The 100 Mbps Ethernet is called as FastEthernet even today, although we have much faster Ethernet standards (1 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet).

The "100" in 100Base-TX is used to mention the transmission speed of 100 Mbps. The "Base" is used to denote baseband signaling. The letter "T" is used to identify that the cabling used is copper twisted pair.

Main characteristics of 100Base-TX FastEthernet are listed below.

• Operating speed of FastEthernet is 100 Mbps.
• Similar to other Ethernet standards, 100Base-TX uses baseband signals to transfer data.
• FastEthernet supports a maximum distance 100 meters between the network switch and the client computer.
• Category of twisted pair cable required is Cat 5, Cat 5e or above with RJ-45 connectors.

100 Mbps FastEthernet network devices had replaced by 1 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet with a speed of 1,000,000,000 bits per second.

Feed your brain that Mbps is used to represent megabits per second, not megabytes per second. MB/sec is used to represent megabytes per second.