Bandwidth - A brief Introduction

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The term Bandwith is one among those words which you frequently encounter in Computer Knowledge section competitive exams. In this post we will have a brief introduction of Bandwith. 

What is Bandwidth ?

The bandwith is the range of frequencies within a given band. In simple words we can say that the Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another in a given time period (usually a second). Technically speaking, Bandwidth is the information carrying capacity of a communication channel. The channel may be analog or digital. Analog transmissions are measured in cycles per second (hertz or Hz) and digital transmissions are measured in bits per second.

A bit propagates through a medium close to the speed of light. The number of bits that can be transferred per second depends on the rate at which the transmitter can send the data.

In general, Fast Ethernet is rated at 100 M bits / sec. But due to latency caused by congestion or other factors, a system may never operate at its optimal rate. Throughput is the measured performance of a system as opposed to its performance. The throughput changes with the environmental factors like noise, data errors, attenuation due to cable distance and so on.

Copper cable, fibre optic cable and wireless communication systems all have different transmission characteristics and thus have different bandwidths.

Encoding and compression techniques have improved data rates. The higher the bandwidth of a data channel, the higher the transmission rate. Increasing the bandwidth may not provide data rates that support realtime voice and video transfers. A single user transferring a large file can quickly consume all the bandwidth, holding up voice and video packets and causing delay distortions.

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