Bandwidth is one of those technical terms that has been overloaded in popular speech: as an example, an editor might ask if you have the bandwidth to write a Hackaday piece about bandwidth. Besides this colloquial usage, there are several very specific meanings in an engineering context. We might speak about the bandwidth of a signal like the human voice, or of a system like a filter or an oscilloscope — or, we might consider the bandwidth of our internet connection. But, while the latter example might seem fundamentally different from the others, there’s actually a very deep and interesting connection that we’ll uncover before we’re done.
Let’s have a look at what we mean by the term bandwidth in various contexts.
Digital Bandwidth
Perhaps the most common usage of the term bandwidth is for the data bandwidth of digital channels, in other words, the rate of information transfer. In this case, it’s measured in bits per second. Your ISP might provision you 50/10 Mbps internet service for example, meaning you have 50 million bits per second of download capacity and 10 million bits per second of upload. In this case you would say that the download bandwidth is 50 Mbps. Measuring the digital bandwidth of a network channel is as easy as sending a fixed number of bits and timing how long it takes; this is what those broadband speed test sites do.
We’ll come back to digital bandwidth in a little while, to see how it’s connected to the next concept, that of signal bandwidth.
Signal Bandwidth
The term bandwid ..
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