UTP

UTP stands for Unshielded Twisted Pair and as the name suggests that they are the twisted pair cables used in the telecom sector in the telephone lines. Graham Bell the inventor of a telephone used such twisted cables for the first time ever in the year 1881. This invention of course was very successful and highly effective and the whole of America started using telephones. The most of the telephone line network was on the twisted pair cables. In the present twisted cables are spread all over the world by different telephone companies for their services.

UTP cables are not only used in the telephone systems but also in the Ethernet networks. They are used for both indoor and outdoor applications. For indoor it is clustered into a set of 25 pairs. Whereas for the outdoor or urban applications cables contains thousands of pairs which are sub divided into smaller bundles.

UTP cables are the most popular cables used in the field of computer networking and one of the most general data networking standard, the Ethernet, also uses the UTP cable. Twisted pair cables are mostly used for short or medium distance data networks because of the low cost factor as the twisted pair cables are cheaper than others like fiber optics.

These cables are also becoming more and more popular in some video applications specifically in things like the security cameras. Many of such cameras have a UTP output with setscrew terminals. The output is of UTP cable because of its excellent bandwidth which matches brilliantly with the baseband of T.V signals.  There many different types of UTP cables some of them are the RJ-11 and RJ-45 which are the 2 to 4 pair telephone cables others also include the Cat 3, Cat 5, Cat 5e, Cat 6, Cat 6a and Cat 7.