There are three strong reasons for the broad acceptance and rapid growth of twisted pair as the horizontal medium: low initial cost, the ability to deliver higher data rate LAN services and the flexibility to use one medium for all services. As speeds increase, copper-based LANs will require more complex and expensive electronics. Although, fiber’s significant bandwidth distance gives it advantages over twisted pair in centralized architectures. However, a centralized architecture may be inappropriate or impractical to implement in many current building environments. 
In addition, in a traditional hierarchical star architecture, fiber loses some of its hard-fought advantages.
In the majority of situations, copper cabling remains the preferred choice for the final link to the desktop, and
other short links such as those found in data centers.
Cost Considerations
The initial 10 Gigabit Ethernet standard was undertaken by the IEEE 802.3ae committee, based primarily on fiber optic technology. Although the enterprise 10 Gigabit fiber electronics are maturing and gaining acceptance, they still remain costly compared to copper. The initial cost of 10 Gigabit copper systems is projected at 40 percent of 10 Gigabit fiber products and is expected to widen over time. Hence, at shorter distances with a large number of links, 10 Gigabit copper based versions become more attractive.
Growth in 10 gigabit Copper Solutions
10 Gigabit Ethernet technology continues to evolve and improve, causing wider adoption. Blade servers, networked enterprise switches, video servers and other applications can benefit now from 10 Gigabit speeds in storage, system backup, teleconferencing and surveillance. Technical advances have enabled the higher density, reduced power and improved cost-effectiveness needed to attract all of the major system developers. The development of 10GBASE-T by the IEEE 802.3an committee is expected to only accelerate this market acceptance.
