Bandwidth

[Joelbanks5]

What is bandwidth exactly? Can I get like a smart people definition and a dumb person definition and what it impacts/effects specifically. 

 

A few examples would also be nice. 

[AlwaysFSX]

Imagine a highway. Bandwidth is how many lanes you have for data to travel down.

[Canada EH]

Bigger pipe, allows for more amount of substance to flow.

[MaxBunny]

10 minutes ago, Joelbanks5 said:

A few examples would also be nice. 

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

17 minutes ago, Joelbanks5 said:

What is bandwidth exactly? Can I get like a smart people definition and a dumb person definition and what it impacts/effects specifically. 

 

A few examples would also be nice. 

As stated before, you can think of it like roads. However, consider two things about roads: roads have a certain number of lanes going in each direction and a speed limit (that we'll assume everyone is a perfect driver and doesn't go above that).

 

A communication channel has the same ideas:

• You can have traffic going one way or the other only (half-duplex) or you can have traffic going both ways at the same time (full-duplex). Obviously if you want communication to go both ways at once, you need at least two lines.
• You can have multiple lines for more stuff to go through.
• And data is sent out at a certain rate, usually dictated by a clock speed.

To calculate bandwidth is pretty simple = # of lines multiplied by the clock speed. So if I have a single line with a clock speed of 1GHz, I will have a 1 gigabit per second channel.

 

EDIT: Oh right, sorry. Bandwidth by definition is data throughput, or how many bytes per second go through a channel. That was just to give an explanation of how it's done.

[risk]

38 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

...

Obviously if you want communication to go both ways at once, you need at least two lines.

...

To calculate bandwidth is pretty simple = # of lines multiplied by the clock speed. So if I have a single line with a clock speed of 1GHz, I will have a 1 gigabit per second channel.

...

This is a great first step towards explaining how to achieve high bandwidth in simple electronics.

 

Lots of electronics these days uses differential pairs and variable voltage on the line to encode more than 1bit of data per line per clock, then there's also DDR and "quad pumped" stuff.

 

Starting to read about Manchester encoding, 8b/10b and Trellis and QAM and PLL clock recovery and Shannon-Hartley can get you pretty far down the rabbit hole...

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, risk said:

Lots of electronics these days uses differential pairs and variable voltage on the line to encode more than 1bit of data per line per clock, then there's also DDR and "quad pumped" stuff.

 

Starting to read about Manchester encoding, 8b/10b and Trellis and QAM and PLL clock recovery and Shannon-Hartley can get you pretty far down the rabbit hole...

Speaking of this stuff... Only digital modulation allows you to stuff more than one bit in a given channel.

 

The rest is just error reduction techniques (Differential signaling, 8b/10b... which these reduce your usable bandwidth) or embedding clock signals to combine your data/clock lines (Manchester).