3Com 3CRWE554G72 manual Glossary

112GLOSSARY

configure to use the best common speed. The order of preference (best first) is: 100BASE-TX full duplex, 100BASE-TX half duplex, 10BASE-T full duplex, and 10BASE-T half duplex. Auto-negotiation is defined in the IEEE

802.3standard for Ethernet and is an operation that takes place in a few milliseconds.

Bandwidth The information capacity, measured in bits per second, that a channel can transmit. The bandwidth of Ethernet is 10 Mbps, the bandwidth of Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbps. The bandwidth for 802.11b wireless is 11Mbps.

Category 3 Cables One of five grades of Twisted Pair (TP) cabling defined by the EIA/TIA-586 standard. Category 3 is voice grade cable and can only be used in Ethernet networks (10BASE-T) to transmit data at speeds of up to 10 Mbps.

Category 5 Cables One of five grades of Twisted Pair (TP) cabling defined by the EIA/TIA-586 standard. Category 5 can be used in Ethernet (10BASE-T) and Fast Ethernet networks (100BASE-TX) and can transmit data up to speeds of 100 Mbps. Category 5 cabling is better to use for network cabling than Category 3, because it supports both Ethernet (10 Mbps) and Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps) speeds.

Channel Similar to any radio device, the OfficeConnect Wireless Cable/DSL gateway allows you to choose different radio channels in the wireless spectrum. A channel is a particular frequency within the 2.4GHz spectrum within which the Gateway operates.

Client The term used to described the desktop PC that is connected to your network.

DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. This protocol automatically assigns an IP address for every computer on your network. Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 contain software that assigns IP addresses to workstations on a network. These assignments are made by the DHCP server software that runs on Windows NT Server, and Windows 95 and Windows 98 will call the server to obtain the address. Windows 98 will allocate itself an address if no DHCP server can be found.

DNS Server Address DNS stands for Domain Name System, which allows Internet host computers to have a domain name (such as 3com.com) and one or more