Bill,

I, too, stand in awe at the information flow that a little hair of glass is capable of.

Speaking to transmission speed. . .when information is crunched by electronics into a binary stream of "on" and "off" and the binary stream is compressed by an exotic algorithm into a shorter, simpler binary stream, there is additional bandwidth gained over the basic analog bandwidth. The better the compression algorithm, the faster a fixed block of info will travel over a connection of fixed analog bandwidth. The actual signal on the wire or fiber is traveling at near light speed, but that is not the speed in consideration. Rather, it is how long it takes to disassemble a piece of info into a binary code, manipulate the code into a minimum of actual bits to be sent down the pipe, sending down the pipe, reversing the manipulation recreating the original binary code (with error detection and correction) and, finally, recreating the info.

So, there are at least two "bandwidths", the analog and the digital, that together work to develop a "transmission speed". Various noise will create errors that slow down the overall transmission by causing retransmission.

Sounds like a transporter. Beam me up Scotty. [Linked Image]

Al Hildenbrand