Tim Streater wrote:
In article
,
jim wrote:

On Nov 16, 8:37�pm, "www.GymRatZ.co.uk"
wrote:
On 16/11/2010 20:10, dennis@home wrote:

My other guess is that digital media will speed up through improved
compression techniques and technology requiring LESS bandwidth
than is
currently needed. Certainly in a domestic capacity at least.

I doubt that, the current compression technology chucks stuff away
and
degrades the image.
Compressing more will result in an even worse image.

But in the same way is it was "impossible" to increase the capacity
of a
DVD until technology allowed more data to be stored on different layers
of the same disc. Perhaps compression was the wrong term to use, what I
ment was some form of simultaneus data transfer like diferent "colour"
binary digits... Blue, Red, Green, 0s and 1s
sort of like combination between DVD layers and multiple frequencies
transmitted simultaneously....
/////

NO! NO! a thousand times NO!

The bandwidth of any communication channel - whether formed by CAT5, 6
or fiberoptic or radio waves or plain audio or whatever - is a
physical limit of that channel (often expressed in MHz). No amount of
jiggery pokery with the electronics, compression algorithm maths,
frequency mixing, or any other deceptively clever compression scams,
can increase the maximum physical bandwidth.

The information capacity of fibre or radio is a function of the
frequency used. So, what is it that limits cat5 or cat6 then?


maximum voltage before the insulation breaks down and maximum distance
before the tail end signal is swamped by the return transmitter...which
is a function of the attenuation at the frequency of interest.

And of course, the chips driving it.

No sure where GaAs gives out but maybe 300GHz?

That means wire probably won't ever do more than 10 terabits/s.

At that sort of frequencies anyway, you are better off using a waveguide
than wire, and once you do that, you find that fibre and light is
probably cheaper.





That should be fibreoptic, BTW.