If you want to get to the root of these terms, without getting caught up in all of the ways their meaning has been distorted, the best place to look may be a dictionary. In baseband signalling, you have one signal using all of the bandwidth available on the wire. In broadband signalling, there are multiple signals on the wire, multiplexed in the frequency domain. On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 01:23:51PM -0400, Miles Fidelman wrote:
On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Roeland Meyer wrote:
Broadband isn't a speed, it's a signaling architecture. The alternative is baseband. Ethernet is baseband. Broadcast radio is broadband. Now that you have the two competing terms, please see your friendly neighborhood search engine (PSYFNSE).
Though, to be fair, a lot of people have coopted the term "broadband." You and I know that broadband is defined in the 802 series of specs as a way to run ethernet over an analog cable system. But... the cable companies would have you believe that it means "the fastest thing going" and the telcos would have you believe that DSL is "broadband."
Miles
************************************************************************** The Center for Civic Networking PO Box 600618 Miles R. Fidelman, President & Newtonville, MA 02460-0006 Director, Municipal Telecommunications Strategies Program 617-558-3698 fax: 617-630-8946 mfidelman@civicnet.org http://civic.net/ccn.html
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