My TN Connection

Have you ever wondered why a stick appears to bend when you put it into standing water? Well this phenomena can best be summarized by the concept of refractive index or index of refraction. The index of refraction is basically the ratio between the speed of light in any given medium versus the speed of light in a vacuum. Since air and water have two different refractive indexes, the stick appears to bend as it is inserted into the water. Although this is a great parlor trick to amaze your children, how does this relate to optical fiber networks? continue »

The term ‘media conversion’ can be easily misinterpreted by those who are unfamiliar with data networking technology and the wide range of hardware equipment and software programs that support computer networks. Alternate meanings can be applied to each of the words which make up the term, and as a result, media conversion is used to reference a wide variety of technology based equipment and/or software.

This particular article will simply define the meaning of the term ‘media conversion’ as it relates to the data networking industry and the transfer of data on a computer network. continue »

Fiber optic cabling provides numerous benefits for transporting the video signaling in a security and surveillance network and you can read more about those benefits in my previous post here. Once the need for fiber optic cabling has been identified or the need to transport the video signal on an existing fiber optic backbone exists, the next problem to solve is how to accomplish this task while protecting your investment in existing copper-based video equipment.

Before we discuss how media conversion can ease this transition to fiber optic cabling, let’s first review the common components and architectures of today’s copper-based video security and surveillance systems.

Whether the video surveillance is analog-based or IP-based, there are a number of common components to most video systems including cameras, cabling infrastructure, monitors and a means of recording the video for future use and playback. Let’s take a quick look at the two main technologies for video systems in use today. continue »