I was trying explain telecommunication bandwidth to someone today using roads and cars as a metaphor. The road is the physical circuit, and cars are the ones and zeros being transmitted along it. Once the you scale things up in this analogy, the end results are both awesome and terrifying.
The smallest telecoms unit is the E0 which is the equivalent of a single telephone line capable of 64 kilobits per second (64,000 ones and zeros per second). So in our analogy this would be a B road with a single lane in each direction, carrying 64,000 cars per second each travelling at approximately 1.15 million kilometers per hour.
Of course in the real world a single car travelling at 1000 times the speed of sound would vaporize everything for hundreds of miles in every direction from the air friction alone. But for the sake of this analogy we can ignore that and move on up the hierarchy.
The next unit up is the E1 which consists of 32 these single telephone lines. Our road is now a motorway with 32 lanes in each direction, pretty neat.
The next commonly used unit is the STM1 which consists of 64 E1s, our motorway now has 2048 lanes in each direction.
This carries on in multiples of four up to the STM64 which in our metaphor is a motorway, 2.6 million lanes wide, carrying 10 million million cars per second. The road now blankets the entire planet in a roaring blur of heat and light.
Imagine standing next to that road.
In reality there are thousands of STM64s globally that form the backbone of the internet. The sheer volume of data that flows around the globe is almost impossible to envision.
That's a whole lot of cats and selfies.
The smallest telecoms unit is the E0 which is the equivalent of a single telephone line capable of 64 kilobits per second (64,000 ones and zeros per second). So in our analogy this would be a B road with a single lane in each direction, carrying 64,000 cars per second each travelling at approximately 1.15 million kilometers per hour.
Of course in the real world a single car travelling at 1000 times the speed of sound would vaporize everything for hundreds of miles in every direction from the air friction alone. But for the sake of this analogy we can ignore that and move on up the hierarchy.
The next unit up is the E1 which consists of 32 these single telephone lines. Our road is now a motorway with 32 lanes in each direction, pretty neat.
The next commonly used unit is the STM1 which consists of 64 E1s, our motorway now has 2048 lanes in each direction.
This carries on in multiples of four up to the STM64 which in our metaphor is a motorway, 2.6 million lanes wide, carrying 10 million million cars per second. The road now blankets the entire planet in a roaring blur of heat and light.
Imagine standing next to that road.
In reality there are thousands of STM64s globally that form the backbone of the internet. The sheer volume of data that flows around the globe is almost impossible to envision.
That's a whole lot of cats and selfies.
