eli5: What is bandwidth?
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Lets imagine you are a kid again and a playing flashlight telephone with your friend Dave. You both had flashlight strong enough to be seen from each other’s house and you both flash each other messages by turning your flashlights on and off in specific patterns that represent letters and puncutation. It’s a fairly basic but functional messaging system, but there is a problem: when you have a big message to send, you flash your light as fast as you can, but David isn’t fast enough to transcribe your signals correctly. With some experimentation you and David figure out exactly how fast you can flash your lights before the messages get scrambled. In doing so, you have basically discover what Bandwidth is.
Bandwidth is a measurement of how fast you can change the data in a signal without loosing data in it. Depending on which transmission method you use, you either encode the data as changes in amplitude (AM signals) and the bandwidth tells you how short each data element can be, or the data is encoded as a component of which frequencies are in the signal (FM) and the bandwidth limits how many data bits can be encoded at once. Either way, the higher the bandwidth, the more data you can send at once.
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