Bandwidth

=Bandwidth= Author: TJ Ethington

Bandwidth is a measurment of how much information can pass through a wire at one time. You might have heard of bandwidth compared to something like a road. Imagine a two lane road, not very many people can get by at once, can they? Now how about a highway. There are many lanes on a highway, and so many different people can be moving at once on a highway. This is kind of how it is inside of a cable. Information from sites or downloads are passing both ways through the wire connecting your computer to the internet, and only so much of this information can pass at once. So the higher the bandwidth of your computer the faster things will download and pop up on your screen. And you ISP (Internet Service Provider) can either have a large or small bandwidth. Dial up accounts with bandwidths that download about 50 kilobits a second are really slow compared to some of the more exspensive services with much larger bandwidth.

Scientists have been researching into bandwidth from the 1920s and have had many discoveries on how to increase the bandwidth of cables ever since. One man, Harry Nyquist, developed the Nyquist Intersymbol Interference Therom which allows calculation of a theoretical maximum rate for data to be sent. But another man named Claude Shannon saw that the rates calculated by Nyquist's theorm were often not achieved in life, because they did not account for some factors such as inherent noise. He refined the therom and the new version became know as Shannon's Therom.

Broadband is a term that refers to a piece of hardware or media that has a high bandwidth. Broadband in houses usually use either cable through a TV or DSL through a phone line to connect. Coaxial cables connect your TV and your computers to the internet, or a phone line will work as well.

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