Use the right pipes in your network’s plumbing

Wiring in a network is like plumbing in a house. Just as pipes form the pathways through which water flows to and from your plumbing fixtures, a network’s wiring provides the pathways through which computers transmit data using electrical signals. The amount of data that computers can move through a wiring system at any one  time depends on the characteristics of the wires, or pipes, installed. The larger the pipes, the more data the computers can send simultaneously.

You can think of a network’s bandwidth as the size of a network’s pipes. Bandwidth represents a range of usable frequencies and is measured in hertz (Hz). A higher hertz rating for a network medium means higher available bandwidth. Higher bandwidth translates into bigger pipes to carry data. Just because you have big pipes, however, doesn’t mean you always get to fill them completely. Therefore, it makes sense to try to measure the actual amount of data (called throughput) flowing through the pipes.

Different types of cabling are rated for different amounts of data flow at different distances. Remember, however, that even if a pipe is big enough to handle all the water you send through it, that pipe can still get clogged. As a result, although a given amount of data can theoretically flow through a cable, in the real world you may see less data flow than the maximum bandwidth indicates. Plumbers will tell you that mineral deposits and other obstructions can often restrict the water flow in pipes. In keeping with our metaphor, we can say that noise, cross-talk, electromagnetic interference (EMI), and other network maladies can often
degrade the actual performance of your cable. Throughput, commonly measured in bits per second (bps), describes the actual amount of data that’s flowing through a cable at any one time.

If you take one pipe and divide it into little pipes, you’ve just reinvented the concept of broadband transmission (in which multiple transmissions at different frequencies use the same  networking medium simultaneously). If the pipe is kept whole instead of subdivided, you end up with the concept of baseband transmission (in which the entire bandwidth is used to carry only one set of frequencies and one transmission at a time).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under Computers, IT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.