Broadband and Internet 101

Posted by james
March 31, 2008

Internet is the World Wide Web. Broadband is the medium that carries it. Internet is the international computer network linking together thousands of individual networks. Broadband is the transmitter of these signals.

The most popular features of the Internet include electronic mail (of course you know e-mail), discussion groups (called newsgroups or bulletin boards, where users can post messages and look for responses on a system called Usenet). There is also the online conversations or chats, adventure and role-playing games and information retrieval You can also find electronic commerce (e-commerce) in the Net where you can buy and sell stuff at the click of a button.

On the other hand, broadband is the high-speed transmission. It is used to refer to Internet access which uses cable modems or DSL (Digital Subscriber Line). Broadband DSL connections are faster compared to dial-up connections.

Dial-up connections utilize phone lines to connect to the Internet while broadband uses cables.

High-speed transmission is commonly used to refer to Internet access via cable modems or DSL, which is faster than dial-up. For years, “broadband” has referred to a higher-speed connection, but the actual speed threshold has varied.

Along with digital subscriber line technology, cable modems ushered in the age of broadband Internet access in developed countries. Before DSL and cable modems, Internet access involved slow dial-up access over a public switched telephone network.

Users in a neighborhood share the available bandwidth provided by a single cable line. Therefore, connection speed can vary depending on how many people are using the service at the same time.

While T1 (1.5 Mbps) has been widely used as the threshold, others have used T3 (45 Mbps) for broadband. For example, after the turn of the century, South Korea leapfrogged the U.S. in Internet access, offering DSL up to 50 Mbps and calling their 1.5 Mbps service “light.”

Mbps is an abbreviation for megabits per second. It is the data transfer speeds as measured in megabits. This unit is mostly used in networking technologies such as broadband.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is the greatest force to the popularization of the Internet. It is a hypertext system (a computer based retrieval system) which makes browsing the Internet both fast and intuitive.

The information stored in the computer networks connected to the Internet forms a huge cyber library. But the enormous quantity of data and information in these interconnected computers makes it difficult to retrieve the information.

This is where broadband comes in because with the use of these cables, the information available in the Internet can be retrieved really fast and without hassles.

The broadband medium can carry signals from different network carriers. This is done through fiber-optic cable. Fiber-optic cable is a thin glass strand designed for transmission. It is capable of transmitting trillions of bits per second

Broadband technology can support a wide range of frequencies. Broadband in general refers to data transmission where multiple pieces of data are sent simultaneously to increase the effective rate of transmission. In network engineering this term is used for methods where two or more signals share a medium.

Various forms of DSL service are broadband in the sense that digital information is sent over one channel and voice over another channel sharing a single pair of wires.

James Monahan is the owner and senior editor of BroadbandBase.com

Computers

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