Inside Look at the Internet
1.4.2 Physical Media
Chapter 1
1.1 What Is the Internet?
1.1.1 Nuts-and-Bolts Description
1.1.2 A Service Description
1.1.3 What Is a Protocol?
1.2 The Network Edge
1.2.1 End Systems, Clients, and Servers
1.2.2 Connectionless and Connection-Oriented Service
1.3 Network Core
1.3.1 Circuit Switching and Packet Switching
1.3.2 Packed-Switched Networks: Datagram Networks and Virtual-Circuit Networks
1.4 Access Networks and Physical Media
1.4.1 Access Networks
1.4.2 Physical Media
1.5 ISPs and Internet Backbones
1.6 Delay and Loss in Packets-Switched Networks
1.6.1 Types of Delay
1.6.2 Queuing Delay and Packet Loss
1.6.3 Delay and Routes in the Internet
1.7 Protocol Layers and Their Service Models
1.7.1 Layered Architecture
1.7.2 Layers, Messages, Segments, Datagrams, and Frames

Physical media fall into two categories: guided media and unguided media. With guided media, the waves are guided along a solid medium, such as a fiber-optic cable, a twisted-pair copper wore, or a coaxial cable. With unguided media, the waves propagate in the atmosphere and in outer space, such as in a wireless LAN or a digital satellite channel.