The Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission (Strategic Technology Series) [Paperback]

Cary Lu (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 157231513X | ISBN-13: 978-1572315136 | Publication Date: August 1, 1998

Bandwidth how much information you can move from one place to another and how fast you can move it is the lifeblood of digital communications. "The Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission offers solid guidance to business managers as they make decisions about bandwidth for the networking future of their organizations. The book builds a framework for understanding bandwidth, offering concise, clear information about such key issues as types and sources of bandwidth, identifying and determining costs, and planning ahead.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Increasingly, we are faced with choices about communications devices. Do you purchase a high-definition TV or a regular TV? An analog cell phone or a digital one? A 56K modem, an ISDN line, or maybe a cable modem? All of these decisions involve an understanding of bandwidth, which is a measure of the amount of data transmission and reception over a specified time.

In The Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission, the late Cary Lu has provided the material that enables you to make intelligent decisions about communication devices. Given the technical nature of the subject, one would expect a dry, very hard-to-read book. But be prepared to be surprised, since Lu's style presents the technical information in a clear and accessible form. Often, the book reads like a narrative that traces the history behind the technology. The chapters on broadcast bandwidth, audio, and video explain all the advantages and disadvantages of analog and digital for both mediums. The chapters on the Internet and the future of bandwidth technology are particularly good.

It easy to recommend this book for both the communications savvy and the average consumer who wants to make more informed choices about the communication devices he or she will use. All readers will appreciate this well-written, informative book. --Robert Frankland

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157231513X
• ISBN-13: 978-1572315136
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,874,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bandwidth made clear! An entire book about it!, December 1, 1998

By 

Lowell Thing ([e-mail]) (Kingston, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission (Strategic Technology Series) (Paperback)

If you've ever been puzzled by bandwidth or wanted to know more about it, this book is for you. For most of us, bandwidth is how much information we can get in front of us how quickly. But how does it happen? How can the same piece of copper wire that carries a low-grade voice signal to us at a mere four thousand bits per second also carry a high-quality mixture of images and text, even motion video, at over a million bits per second? What's the difference between the original bandwidth of radio broadcast frequency bands and bandwidth as we usually read about it in the popular media? Lu starts from the beginning, not neglecting the Stone Age, and carries us through the telegraph (including a widely-used system we had never heard of called the optical telegraph) into today's computer and telecommunication networks. In two chapters, "Thinking about Bandwidth" and "Looking at Bandwidth," he provides fascinating comparisons of bandwidths, proving, among other things, that it would be 640,000 times faster to fly 6 million CD-ROMs to Europe on a Boeing 747 than to upload them over the European E-1 lines under the Atlantic. But the book is practical, too, containing compact tables that define and compare various bandwidth measurements, starting with the hertz (cycles per second) for analog bandwidth and bps (bits per second) for digital bandwidth. Two chapters explain broadcast bandwidth, audio and video, the latter including brief explanations of TV standards, cable TV, color TV, and satellite TV. Datacasting is explained, too - how non-video data can be carried along with the video signal. In another long chapter, Lu explains Point-to-Point (rather than broadcast) Bandwidth, both wired and wireless transmission media and methods. A final chapter, devoted to bandwidth on the Internet, compares in human terms the ways to access the Internet (ISDN, DSL, cable modems, and wireless and satellite). Lu, the former science and technology editor for the Children's Television Workshop in the U.S., hopes that future bandwidth growth will be filled by better science content for children. He wonders whether bandwidth will be shared fairly among the world's peoples, rich and poor. He notes that bandwidth bottlenecks will persist and that the amount of bandwidth required for widespread video-on-demand and full-motion videoconferencing is not likely to arrive in this generation.

Cary Lu, a well-known science writer and editor, died shortly before the book was completed and final sections were written by his friends, New York Times computer columnist Stephen Manes and Adam Engst, author of the Internet Starter Kit series. Without in any way stinting on the details, this book aims for the general reader who needs help with technical explanations. It's also written by someone who has thought carefully about the significance of bandwidth. At whatis.com, where we continually fine-tune our definition of bandwidth, The Race for Bandwidth is a book that we have been unconsciously waiting for. Now that it's here, we plan to keep it very handy.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "must have" for the lay man and professional alike., March 12, 1999

By 

Jayant Ochani "Johnny Ochani" (Plano, Texas, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission (Strategic Technology Series) (Paperback)

An excellent explanation of what bandwidth is all about and what it means. Gives information not found in textbooks or industry documents. Answers such questions as why digital isn't always better than analog. Very well organized and treats subjects such as audio bandwidth and video bandwidth in different chapters. Filled with interesting tidbits, the book makes for some excellent reading. Some will see the book as leisure reading, others as something more serious. I saw it as both!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No matter how much you know, you'll learn something here, June 18, 2001

By 

Penmachine "penmachine_com" (Vancouver, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission (Strategic Technology Series) (Paperback)

A great read -- very informative, not too technical (or, more properly, technical, but without jargon), and wide-ranging. Stephen Manes and Adam Engst deserve our thanks for shepherding it to completion after Cary Lu's death in 1997.

I find it unfortunate that the book is published as part of Microsoft Press's "Strategic Technology" series, whose other titles seem to be much more geek-specific: "Understanding ActiveX and OLE", "Understanding Electronic Commerce", "Understanding Intranets". Perhaps they are also aimed at a general audience, but since Lu's book covers so much about non-computing activities such as telegraphy, broadcasting, telephones, and even shipping and air flight -- stuff that should be interesting to people who aren't that computer-focused -- it seems that it's been relegated to a publishing ghetto from which it deserves to escape.

The cover doesn't help much, describing it as the "guide to key technologies behind fast Internet connectivity, wireless communications, video conferencing, and interactive television." It's more than that. It's a guide to so much that we use already today, not just these technologies of most people's future. The most interesting sections for me so far have discussed FM radio and shutter telegraphs, for instance.

This book should not live in the Computing section of bookstores, but in the general science section. It will surely outlive every other title in the

"Strategic Technology" series, because it deals with more universal topics in a less time-limited way. It would be sad to see it in the ubiquitous computer title remainder bins in a year or two, when it should really continue to be printed like other wonderful general science books such as James Gleick's "Chaos" or Stephen Jay Gould's essay collections.

It's also a shame that Lu wasn't around to promote the book. I think it could have reached a wider audience if he were able to do the promotional and talk-show circuit to entice people with its broad scope and easy fascination.

Don't think of this as just another "neato new technology" book. The book is good enough and concise enough that I read it voraciously in a little over a day. It's a miracle of brevity that rivals Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" guide to writing good English, and E. Annie Proulx's novels.

I'm amazed at how much is packed into a relatively slim volume, and how much of that information likely won't require revision for a long time. In particular, the early chapters discussing what bandwidth is and how it plays into the history of communications are, with a few exceptions such as pricing examples, pretty timeless.

Other sections seem (understandably, given the author's death before completion) a bit rushed and muddled, and could use clearing up. Some of the discussions of digital cell phone technology, and particularly granularity, seem dropped in from somewhere else, without proper context or explanation -- as if surrounding parts were missing.

The glossary is sometimes helpful, sometimes tautological -- having separate listings for each acronym, when the full definition is often a line or two away, also seems redundant.

Despite its flaws, I encourage you to buy it sight unseen. Not only will it outlast most more expensive technology titles you could purchase, it will give you a broad understanding which those books can't touch.

Even if you work for the phone company and live and breathe bandwidth every day, you'll certainly learn something -- such as why the world's best AM radio is made in New Zealand, that 18th century French optical telegraphs had bandwidths of a fraction of a bit per second, or that someone with graduate degrees in Physics and Biology once worked on "Sesame Street".