eli5: What is bandwidth?
In: 48
God a lot of these explanations are terrible.
Radio signals are typically described as having a particularly frequency, but historically when it was necessary to communicate more information at once multiple related signals were sent at once. A range of frequencies was designated as being used for a sequence of related signals. Depicted on an axis showing all possibly frequencies, the range was depicted as a stroke on this graph, covering all frequencies in use. The result was a “band” the width of which indicated how many frequencies were in use. Hence Bandwidth.
Because sending multiple signals was used to achieve faster speeds in mediums like radio, when more advanced signaling methods were invented the term bandwidth was borrowed to generally refer to the the amount of information simultaneously crammed into a single signal.
Because the determining factor in data transfer rates is often signal density (though not the only one) and bandwidth had also become synonymous with data speeds.
Notably, there are all kinds of ways to increase the information density of a given signal, such as insulating the medium to reduce interference, removing error correction, increase the cycling speed of the signa etc etc. However, all of these techniques that don’t increase the “width” of the involved frequency band are collectively referred to as “increasing bandwidth”
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