【My Study Note】What is broadband?
What is broadband?
The term broadband has a few definitions. In terms of internet connectivity, it’s used to refer to any connectivity technology that isn’t dial-up Internet.
Broadband Internet is almost always much faster than even the fastest dial-up connections and refers to connections that are always on. This means that they’re long-lasting connections that don’t need to be established with each use.
They’re essentially links that are always present. Broadband shaped today’s world. While the Internet itself is a totally amazing invention, it wasn’t until the advent of broadband technologies that its true potential for business and home users was realized.
Long before people had broadband connections at home, businesses spent a lot of resources on them usually out of necessity. If you had an office with more than a few employees, the bandwidth available by a single dial-up connection would quickly be oversaturated by just a few users.
By the mid-1990s, it had become pretty common for businesses that needed internet access for their employees to use various T-carrier technologies.
T-carrier technologies
T-carrier technologies were originally invented by AT&T in order to transmit multiple phone calls over a single link.
Eventually, they also became common transmission systems to transfer data much faster than any dial-up connection could handle.
After businesses got into the broadband game, home use became more prevalent. As different aspects of the Internet, like the World Wide Web became more complex, they also required ever-increasing data transfer rates.
In the days of dial-up, even a single image on a web page could take many seconds to download and display. High resolution photos that you can now take on a cell phone would have required a long time to download and a lot of your patience.
A single picture taken on a smartphone today can easily be several megabytes in size. Two megabytes would translate to 16,777,216 bits. At a baud rate of 14.4 kilobits per second, that many bits would take nearly 20 minutes to download.
No one would’ve had time to download all the hilarious cat images on the internet back then. Without broadband internet connection technologies, the Internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be able to stream music, or movies, or easily share photos.
T-carrier technologies require dedicated lines, which makes them more expensive. For this reason, you usually only see them in use by businesses. But other broadband solutions also exist for both businesses and consumers.