Everything about Broadband totally explained
The term
Broadband can have different meanings in different contexts. The term's meaning has undergone substantial shifts.
In telecommunications
Broadband in
telecommunications is a term that refers to a signaling method that includes or handles a relatively wide range of
frequencies, which may be divided into channels or
frequency bins.
Broadband is always a
relative term, understood according to its context. The wider the
bandwidth, the greater the information-carrying capacity. In
radio, for example, a very narrow-band signal will carry
Morse code; a broader band will carry speech; a still broader band is required to carry
music without losing the high
audio frequencies required for realistic
sound reproduction. A
television antenna described as "normal" may be capable of receiving a certain range of channels; one described as "broadband" will receive more channels. In data communications a
modem will transmit a bandwidth of 64 kilobits per seconds (kbit/s) over a
telephone line; over the same telephone line a bandwidth of several megabits per second can be handled by
ADSL, which is described as
broadband (relative to a modem over a telephone line, although much less than can be achieved over a
fiber optic circuit, for example).
In data communications
Broadband in
data communications can refer to
broadband networks or
broadband Internet and may have the same meaning as above, so that
data transmission over a
fiber optic cable would be referred to as broadband as compared to a
telephone modem operating at
56,000 bits per second.
However,
broadband in
data communications is frequently used in a more technical sense to refer to data transmission where multiple pieces of data are sent simultaneously to increase the effective rate of transmission, regardless of actual
data rate. In
network engineering this term is used for methods where two or more signals share a medium.
In video
Broadband in
analog video distribution is traditionally used to refer to systems such as
cable television, where the individual channels are
modulated on carriers at fixed frequencies. In this context,
baseband is the term's
antonym, referring to a single channel of analog video, typically in
composite form with an
audio subcarrier. The act of demodulating converts broadband video to baseband video.
However,
broadband video in the context of
streaming Internet video has come to mean video files that have
bitrates high enough to require
broadband Internet access in order to view them.
Broadband video is also sometimes used to describe
IPTV Video on demand.
In DSL
The various forms of
Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services are
broadband in the sense that digital information is sent over a high-bandwidth channel above the
baseband voice channel on a single pair of wires.
In Ethernet
A
baseband transmission sends one type of signal using a medium's full bandwidth, as in
100BASE-T Ethernet. Ethernet, however, is the common interface to broadband modems such as DSL data links, and has a high data rate itself, so is sometimes referred to as broadband. Ethernet provisioned over
cable modem is a common alternative to DSL.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Broadband'.
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