What is the Meaning of Broadband? | Cambra Del Llibre Cat

The word broadband (bredb?ndsudbydere) entered public consciousness with the widespread use of the internet in the late 1990s. It quickly became a buzzword among the internet-savvy people. However, very few people have a clear understanding of this word. They often use this word as a substitute for high speed and vice versa, and they are not off the mark either. However, the term is quite vague and has no exact definition. The term is also used with radio, television, computer network and mobile network, and to complicate matters for the non-technical users, it has a slightly different meaning in each.

In radio, broadband (mobilt bredb?nd) generally means a facility that allows high quality sound transmission requiring high audio frequencies. In television, it usually means an infrastructure that carries a large number of television channels as well as a wide range of frequencies on the same cable. All of today?s cable networks are broadband networks (bredb?ndsudbydere). In computer networks, it means an infrastructure that allows high speed communication between computers, such as the 10PASS-TS Ethernet network. In cell phones, the term implies access to the internet.

However, most people associate broadband with the internet. This is because the term was first popularized by telephone companies and internet service providers (ISPs) to market their high speed cable connections. In those days, most people who used the internet at home had either 56K modem or ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) that connected through the public telephone line. In contrast to this, people came to understand broadband as DSL (digital subscriber line) connection with much higher download and upload speed. However, newer versions of ADSL are almost as fast as DSL and are known as ADSL broadband.

Broadband network does mean a high speed network with faster download and upload time, but not in the way most non-technical people believe it to be. It is essentially a signal having a greater bandwidth. A simple way to understand bandwidth is to look at it as a road with a certain number of lanes where all cars travel at the same speed. For example, let take two roads, one a narrow one of two lanes, and another a wider one of sixteen lanes. Now let?s suppose that on both roads the start and end lines are drawn a hundred meters apart, and there are a thousand cars waiting in tightly packed queues to start the race. If the speed of each car is 100 meters per second, how many cars will cross the finish line on the two-lane road in 1 minute? The answer is 120 cars. And how many cars will cross the finish line on the sixteen-lane road in the same time? The answer is 960 cars.? Now think of these two roads and communication signals and you know what bandwidth means. All communication signals travel at the same speed, which is slightly lower than that of light, but one with a higher bandwidth transmits much more data than the one with the lower bandwidth at the same time.

There is no universal agreement on what exactly should be the minimum speed of broadband, but it suffices to say that it should be sufficiently high for smooth and uninterrupted transmission of text, audio and video signals. A broadband access makes it possible to upload and download large amounts of data within a few minutes and seconds. In that sense, most of today?s computer networks and internet connections are broadband.

Source: http://cambrallibrecat.com/?p=140

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