RF

Radio Over Ethernet 

The main idea of Radio over Ethernet is to transfer an RF (Analog Signal) from one location to another location. Basic concept can be illustrated as follows.

What would be the advantage of using this technology comparing to the conventional RF cable ?

You can easily think of a couple of obvious advantage.

i) It would suffer from signal attenuation much less than RF cable, implying that it would need much less ampliflication and as result much less energy to transfer the signal.

ii) Cabling Cost would be much lower

iii) If you use Copper based ethernet, you may be able to remove even power supply cable for the end-unit by using PoE(Power over Ethernet)

In some application, they use Ethernet cable not as packet packet protocol but as simple copper cable. It may sound a little primitive comparing to the case described above, but there are a couple of advantage as well. It does not require AD/DA conversion and packetizing overhead (complexity). Also this can cover much more distance (up to a couple of hundred meters) comparing to the case described above( max 100 meters but much shorter distance in practice).

Any advantage of using Copper wire over Optical fiber ?

In terms of technical aspect, I think Optical Fiber has more advantages over Copper in this application. So adopting Optical fiber is getting wider and wider, but still Copper ethernet cable would hold some advantage in practical sense.

• i) Cost of copper wiring would be lower than optical fiber

• ii) More importantly, we can use PoE (Power over Ethernet) and remove power line if we use copper ethernet cable. This will be huge advantage in terms of equipment deployment.