Comparative Evaluation of Communications Transmission Media

The selection of communications transmission media for any specified operation is neither a purely technical problem nor a purely economic one, but a complex combination of these two factors. To minimize work involved in evaluating all the possible choices, a first-order approximation method is provided to limit the number of specific transmission media which must be considered in any specific application. This method provides a numerical measure of the expected coimbination of technical and economic factors and is based on the author´s empirically-derived experience with communications equipments and systems.