Utp or thin coaxial cable?

[neveryona]

Had a few questions for all those networking specialists out there.
Let's say I have a building, with two floors. The main server will be on the first floor, with workstations set up in various rooms throughout the building. First question is, would it be better to create a backbone between floors, using fiber optic cable or thin coaxial. Second question is, between the workstations, would Utp category 5 suffice between the workstations, using the star-bus topology? And that is all the questions I have for the moment.

[iisbob]

First question is, would it be better to create a backbone between floors, using fiber optic cable or thin coaxial.

Considering the difficulty of getting thinnet now ( 10base2 ) cabling, Fibre would almost be more cost effective-not too mention it's best to keep your backbone faster then your standard workstation interface ( 100Mbps for the backbone, 10 Mbps for interconnection between standard pc's ), but i would suggest that for cost effectiveness and genreal acceptable performance get STP CAT5 cables for your backbone; then lay the workstations out ( using a switch-instead of just a repeater )using CAT5 UTP cabling-paying attention to where you have to run them as there are building codes for cabling.

Namely plenium grade has to be used if you're going to routing the cables through the ceiling.

May i suggest that you look into setting up a wireless network; it would be just practical for a small business, and not really all that more expensive.

[neveryona]

Thanks for the reply...that was helpful...now if you dont' mind, I would like to run this scenario through, and if anyone has any suggestions of what would be a better solution...please let me know....
As I mentioned before, this building has three floors, with an electrical room on the first floor. There is also another building that is located three miles away with only one floor and 5 computers. THere are currently 25 pc's in the first building. There is no network at the moment. THe pc's are either pentium 166, running window 3.1, or 486, running windows 3.1. Now my idea is, is first to upgrade the computers,(Expense is an issue), to pentium 366's, and run win98Se on them. On the first floor,where the electrical room is, I was thinking of having an ATM switch, and two file servers(one for back-up), running NT. On the second floor, I was thinking of having another ATM switch, and using fiber optic cable to connect through the floors, including up to the third. The workstations themselves, I figured a bus-star topology would work well. Now to connect to the other building, I figured using PPTP protocol, to remotely access the other server (in the building three miles away, with a ATM switch, and another backup server). The second building is not up to building codes, and they will be relocating to another location 10 months down the road. The workstations themselves, I was going to use fast ethernet cards, and TCP/IP protocol, and for the servers use NETBEUI. SO these are my ideas, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated...