Broadband: The Modern Way of Transmission

Broadband, in the context of conventional electronics and telecommunications, utilizes or carries a wide range of frequencies.

Broadband, in the context of conventional electronics and telecommunications, utilizes or carries a wide range of frequencies. The word "broadband" is understood in relation to wide frequencies.

Broadband covers a wide range of signals as the word itself suggests. It is not like radio signals carrying narrowband that consist of Morse code. Broadband can pack a myriad of other things than just Morse code. It can include video, voice and music. Broadband can do all these without losing high audio frequencies in order to reproduce more natural sounds.

An ordinary TV antenna known as "normal" can accept a limited selection of channels. On the other hand, "broadband" -- or some may say satellite TV antennas -- can accept a wide assortment of channels. In the realm of data communications, the apparatus known as a modem can send and receive data at a bandwidth of 64Kbps (thousand bits per second) over standard copper telephone lines. Its broadband equivalent, ADSL, can send and receive data at a couple of Mbps (million bits per second) over the same phone line.

Today, broadband in relation to the exchange of data, can also refer to the sending of data using fiber optic cables. In contrast, there are other more technical definitions of the word broadband and they mostly refer to the concurrent transmission of data that consist bits and pieces of data with the goal of increasing the effective rate of transmission without the need to consider the actual data rate of transfer.

One more way of using broadband is through multiplexing, which means utilizing separate physical channels concurrently to send data and also may allow multiple accesses. One way to separate the channels is by time (time division multiplexing), in carrier frequency or wavelength division multiplexing and lastly, in access method. As a whole, they comprise broadband communication; taken separately, they are treated as narrowband.

Because a wide band of frequencies are utilized, data maybe multiplexed by simultaneously transmitting them on numerous channels or frequencies. This way, more data are transmitted in a given time frame. Think of it this way: the more lanes there are in a highway, the more vehicles are able to travel simultaneously at a much faster rate. This is how broadband works.

Furthermore, there are established minimum data transfer rates to determine if data are being sent as broadband or narrowband. The minimum transmission rate for broadband varies between 20KHz and 256Kbps to channels at least 6Mhz wide.

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