Wires and cables play a major role in our everyday life. Both are used routinely in electrical and communication equipment to switch energy from one level to another. Wires and cables are very different from each other.

A wire is formed by one or more flexible rod material strand in a single conductor. Most of them are in a cylindrical shape and are inside the cables. We also called them wires if there are several conductors but no isolation.

Wires are generally made from aluminium or copper. Wires can come in a protective or colour-coded sheath, either bare or covered.

Wires are generally measured with the diameter perspective and are grouped based on their gauge numbers. The wire becomes thicker if the gauge number gets smaller.

In residential applications, the wires generally come in 10-20 gauges. The wires are classified per the electrical capacity of their form of insulation. Several letters such as THHN, THWN, THW and XHHN are the key isolation types of individual wire used. 

A wire can be used for electric connections, as jumpers in trouble-shooting and also can be used for transmitting electricity, carrying mechanical loads, transmitting telecommunications signals, heating jewellery, clothes, automobile or any industrial parts such as pins, bulbs, fish hooks and needles. The wire used in these applications mostly come in different types such as solid and stranded. 

• The solid wire has a long length of a single conductor.
• The stranded wire consists of a few thin twisted conductor strands. 
• Solid wires have low strength and are suitable for use at higher frequencies whereas standard wires are more versatile and therefore last longer.
• In comparison, stranded wires have higher cross-sectional area than solid wires with the same current capacity.  

On the other hand, a cable is formed by the combination of two or more insulated wires running together or bonded, twisted or braided. These are mostly isolated to provide better protection than wires. Cables can usually be defined by the number of wires they have and by the gauge. Cables primarily provide the electrical and telecommunication signals in power transmission.

There are more than 20 different types of cables present in the industry for transmission-to-heavy industries applications. Some of the major types of cables which are mostly used are twisted pairs cable, multi-conductor cable, coaxial cable, and fibre optics cable. 

• A twisted pair cable is made up of two twisted cables, mostly used to carry signals. 
• A multi-conductor cable consists of many conductors separated from each other and is used to protect the integrity of the signal by eliminating buzz, distortion and signal attenuation.
• Coaxial cable consists of an internal solid conductor surrounded by a parallel outer foil conductor, covered by an insulating layer, and is commonly used in TV cable. 
• Fibre optic cables aid with a bundle of glass loops to transmit signals. Such cables have a much wider bandwidth than metal cables, which means that more data can be transmitted.