What is broadband?

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta

Think of your home as the ocean where the streams and rivers end. Or think of your home as the city where highway roads finish. The streams and rivers carry water from the mountains to the sea.

The highway roads carry cars and trucks from the suburbs into the city. Of course, unlike the rivers and the streams, the highways roads are two-way roads. In the evening, the traffic will be outgoing, rather than incoming.

The same is true with the data that is sent and received between your computer at home or office and the computers of your Internet Service Providers. Like a road, its capacity determines how fast data can be transmitted from one point to another.

The digital industry term for the capacity to carry data is called "bandwidth." It shows the volume of data that a transmission link can deliver in a second. Usually it is shown in Kilobits per second (Kbps) or Megabits per second (Mbps). As you would have guessed, one Mbps equals approximately 1,000 Kbps.

Which transmission line is considered the slowest for Internet access? The telephone line, of course. Although the best standard now promises a bandwidth of 56 Kbps, in actuality noise and other unfavorable conditions of the telephone line may restrict it to only 28.8 Kbps, or even lower.

Clearly, this line is not sufficient for current applications, which may contain audio and video data. This line is adequate only to carry voice signals.

It is no surprise that the telephone line is sometimes called a "narrowband" line. Another term for narrowband is "baseband." The slow Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) available from some cell phone operators also falls into this category.

If we have a narrowband connection to the Internet, at least we hope that we also have a broadband connection to it. In fact, there is. The cut-off bandwidth is 64 Kbps.

Anything above this speed will fall into the broadband category. People sometimes use broadband and wideband interchangeably.

What technology can deliver a broadband connection to our computers? First, there are the packet radio networks that use radio frequencies to transmit IP data back and forth. Then there is the satellite-based Internet access. However, these two are not commonplace yet.

More commonplace are the cable-TV networks and the xDSL services that are now available to homes in Jakarta. While the ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) is dedicated-it pumps data into your home in a dedicated pipeline, the cable TV-based Internet access is shared.

Sharing means that everybody in the neighborhood shares the same pipeline, and therefore the more people are accessing the Internet at the same time, the less bandwidth each of them gets.

In the U.S., according to a report by Yankee Group, two-thirds of 15 million homes with broadband connection are using cable modems, which connect the home computers to cable-TV network. The ADSL service is still more expensive even in the U.S.

Availability of broadband Internet access service is, understandably, is used to indicate how "wired" a population is. In this sense, Korea leads Asia with the highest percentage of people with broadband access.

Businesses require even higher bandwidth to ensure that their business partners and customers can access their systems from all over the world. They have more options including the expensive leased lines.

Why do people want to have broadband access at home?

Well, for starters, they will need a lot of bandwidth to watch Webcast-live video broadcasts over the Internet.

Secondly, they may have more than one PC at home, all of which are connected by a home network.

Thirdly, unlike the dial-up connection, a broadband connection links the home computers to the Internet 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Fourthly, in many cases subscribers of broadband Internet access pay a flat rate every month, regardless of how much data they download the Internet.

Now you know why people crave for broadband connection.