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Bandwidth Issues

xDSL, present and future. By IcePick icepick74@hotmail.com email me if you use this. 26-April-1998 Since the birth of the World Wide Web, bandwidth has been a concern. Computer users surfing the Web are always in need of more bandwidth. In an effort to attract more surfers, content providers are jazzing up their pages using more multimedia than ever. The new generation of multimedia-laced Web pages contain bigger pictures and have embedded sound files; all these items take more bandwidth to download. The growth of the World Wide Web and its large content pages has led many computer users to seek faster ways of connecting than through analog modems. ADSL and the other products in the xDSL family are leading the way to faster Internet connections. The main advantage of xDSL is that the service is provided using digital signals as opposed to the analog signals used with regular voice modems. Digital circuits use signal levels or changes in signal levels to represent binary 1s and 0s. Digital signals are less susceptible to line noise then analog signals. Circuits based on digital signals can be manipulated using Digital Signal Processors, which have the ability to filter out line noise and other undesirable properties of a circuit. Analog signal transmissions manipulate properties of a carrier signal using either one or a combination of the following to convey data: amplitude, frequency, and phase (Cisco NA). xDSL is a family of products and standards that allows telephone companies to use existing copper-based POTS (plain old telephone service) lines to bring high speed digital services to consumers (Strauch 1997). The x in xDSL stands for one of many implementations of the family of products known as Digital Subscriber Line technology (UUNET 1997). Except for the relatively slow analog connection from the user's computer and the ISP's (Internet Service Provider) modems, the Internet is based on high speed digital circuits. The influx of slow connections from users'...

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