Hello all,
This begins a weekly series of lessons on the medium we all know as the Information Super Highway. As you have heard many say,giving a lecture or seminar, many of this may seem like old news. To those of you who know the Highway it will be old ground in the beginning, to those of you who don't it will be new ground.
In my cyber travels I often hear of a word that has brought much curiousity. The word is Bandwith. Bandwith deals with the amount of information a wire or channel can handle at one particular time. In a Baseband setting information will only travel when the communications channel is clear. Alternatively in a broadband setting information can travel simultaneously while other activities are taking place.
I recently was speaking to someonline friends at a gathering and we were discussing setting up Internet connections. We came to the realization that the task has significant cost factors. Those factors were determined byt the type of connection we would setup. Bandwith also reflects bits per second (bps) and cycles per second (hertz or hz).
We discussed the various types of Network Settings. Here are only some and how bandwidthi is measured approximately...
A Regular Dial up Line is 2400bps to 19.2 bps
T1 line is 1.544 mpbs
Fiber Optic 100 mbps.
Now I am definitely not a techie in this area,but have heard the term of Fiber Optic used more and more. In referring to Telelphone quality,I hear that Fiber Optic lines are and will be a thing of the future for clear transmission. Why would you want clear transmission? Ever dial into a service or even here and experience garbled message displays? One answer may be noise on the line. Supposedly (I say supposedly because there are many views on this and I beg of input from others on this and other topics we will be covering) Fiber Optic will handle this problem well.
Bandwith deals with space and basically we can come to one conclusion when dealing with any kind of space (office,etc.) it is limited. How do you handle the limitation? Compression. With my BBS, I have many files that I like to offer, that are NOT on my CDROM drive but rather on my Hard Disk. These files upcompressed would clog up my drive. For that matter on my CDROM is approximately 1 gig of files uncompressed. With comression the size is now about 1/2 a gig. Compression will shrink files to a lesser more manageable size. In additon it will allow you to keep a group of files together. Some what kind of compression formats are used to handle the Bandwidth?
Let us look at some platforms in comparsion...
On the PC set you will find: ARC (.arc)
PAK (.pak)
PKZIP (.zip)
ZOO (.zoo)
LHARC (.lzh)
On the MAC set you will find: Macbinary (.bin)
Compact Pro (.cpt)
Stuffit (.sit)
On the Unix set you will find: tar (.tar)
Compression deals with Zipping up the files or Compressing them and Unzipping the files and Decomressing them.
Well that wraps up a little on this topic. As always feel free to offer your comments and suggestions...
Mike