OK, there’s nowt on the tele and I’m bored. I’ve been doing some research, so I’ll bore everybody else just for a laff…
A little bit of historical context to begin with. Where does the expression “broadband” actually come from?
Well, unbelievable as it might be, the most you shove down a copper wire using a single digital carrier wave is 64kb/s. How do we achieve better speeds? Well, why not use multiple frequencies, in fact a “broad band” of frequencies. We simultaneously send a bit of the data across each one and just join it all back together at the other end. Clever, hey.
Certainly, the original draft of Wi-Fi 7 talked about applying a similar technique to Wi-Fi. One frequency for send and a different frequency for receive. It’s technically far more difficult to do with radio, for a number of reasons, but if they’ve pulled it off, Wi-Fi 7 will effectively be full duplex, (i.e. simultaneous transmit and receive), whereas earlier standards were only half duplex, (send then wait for a reply then send a bit more etc., similar to how a walkie-talkie works).
Similar clever stuff has improved Wi-Fi continuously over the last 20 years. The theoretical maximum for Wi-Fi 5 was in fact 3.5Gb/s. Wi-Fi 6 is 9.6Gb/s. For Wi-Fi 7 it was expected to be 30 – 40Gb/s. Of course, operational speeds in a real-world environment are nowhere near this because of things like attenuation and interference.
As an aside: Full Fibre uses the same technique. People are still calling it broadband but it’s not in fact, because it only uses two bands. One for upstream and one for downstream, to give a full duplex system, so it’s hardly “broad” band as such.
(Especially @Kodikid, in view of his long-term championship of the SH2).
