"John A. Weeks III" ) writes:
In article
,
Jim Redelfs wrote:

In article
,
"John A. Weeks III" wrote:

Speed has nothing to do with broadband.

Uh, the term is opposed to "narrowband", neither of which were coined
until only a few years ago. "Broadband" was coined to provide
differentiation from the more common dial-up. Speed most certainly has
to do with "broadband".

Broadband is a networking technology

I disagree. "Broadband" is a generic term to describe any of SEVERAL
high-speed connectivity technologies.

speed is a characteristic of a connection.

That goes without saying.

You can have very slow broadband

Sure, relative to a higher rate broadband.

just as you can have very fast baseband.

"Baseband"? My spell-checker doesn't even recognize that one. That is
the first I've heard of it.

So, have you ever heard of 10BaseT Ethernet? The "Base" part
means that it is a baseband signal.

Baseband networking is where the signal is anchored at zero hertz
and goes up from there. 10BaseT uses the first 10 megahertz of
the bandwidth. Broadband means that the signal is not anchored
to zero, and the signal can be relocated in referece to the zero
point. This is important when you are doing multiplexing (ie,
carrying several signals on one line). Just like you can have
10BaseT, which is 10-megabit baseband Ethernet over twisted
pair, you can also have 10BroadT, or other speeds, or other
physical cable mediums.

Words mean things. Broadband infers high - or higher - speed relative
to older, much slower technologies such as dial-up.

I agree that words mean things. That is why I attempted to help
educate you on what Broadband means.


But you didn't.

I still have no clue why "baseband" is in this discussion, since it
has no relevance.

"Broadband" means high bandwidth. It's basically a shortened version of
"broadbandwidth".

"Baseband" basically means a signal that isn't riding on top of something.
A video signal out of your VCR is a "baseband" signal, but if you hook your
your VCR to your tv set via channel 3, then the signal is no longer
baseband; the baseband signal is modulating the channel 3 carrier so it's
now radio frequency. "Baseband" is using band in a vein similar to "CB band",
not bandwidth, but what part of the spectrum.

"Broadband" doesn't care how the signal is delivered, so long as it is
high bandwidth. But the name does imply high speed, because otherwise
you don't get the high bandwidth.

Michael