While every-one these days is talking of broadband, the answers to these questions are not clear. In the articles that follow, we’ll answer each one of these.

Let’s start with a seemingly simple question: What exactly is broadband?

Communication carriers or media, for example, wires or cables, are of two types: broadband and baseband. Baseband is where only one signal passes through the media at a time. So, with broadband, multiple signals can travel on the same media at the same time. The classic example of this is the cable that carries multiple TV channels to your television set.

As with many other things, this definition has also undergone considerable modification. Today, when we speak of broadband, we talk of large-bandwidth access to the Internet. How large is large? Here, interpretations differ, based mostly on the convenience of the person providing the definition. There are those who say that 32 kbps and above is broadband, while there are others who’re sure that it takes at least 64 kbps to qualify as broadband. There are yet others (obviously, ISPs) who insist that anything faster than a dial-up connect is broadband.

So, What exactly is broadband?

We’ll define broadband as Internet access through non-traditional media (other than dial-up over telephone lines) with downstream speeds of at least 64 kbps. We say a lower limit of 64 kbps because a dial-up modem on a telephone line can deliver up to 56 kbps downstream.

When we talk of non-traditional media, we’re actually talking of only two options currently—Internet over cable and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL). Mobile broadband—broadband over your cellphone—will hopefully get added to this list some time soon. When we talk of DSL, we’re actually talking of a number of technologies like ADSL, SDSL, HDSL, IDSL, and VDSL, all of which deliver Internet connects at varying speeds over existing telephone connections, without using the all-too-familiar dial-up modem. The most common DSL implementation in India today is ADSL or Asynchronous DSL. ADSL can deliver from 1.5–9 Mbps downstream (to the user) and 16–640 kbps upstream (user requests to Web servers).

Ideally, when we talk of broadband, we refer to connections to the home, and not to the workplace. Why is that? Typically, a home user will have more data sent down to him in the form of downloaded software or streamed music or video, than data sent back to the Net. On the other hand, businesses will need to send more data out into the Net, in the form of data served from Web servers they host, or software and data transferred to business partners. Asymmetric technologies like ADSL and Internet over cable can’t support this need to transfer large volumes of data out onto the Net. So, corporates would ideally opt for symmetric options—leased lines or the like—where data transfer rates are high in both directions.

However, not all businesses need to transfer huge amounts of data out. With most Indian Websites being hosted at separate data centers, the role of the corporate Internet connection becomes limited to sending and receiving e-mail and browsing the Web. In such a situation, broadband can be used as a corporate solution also.

Another advantage of broadband is that it doesn’t tie up your telephone line and, consequently, doesn’t saddle you with heavy telephone bills. On the flip side, While usage charges for broadband tend to be low, the cost of equipment, like a DSL or cable modem, can be pretty high. Citing these savings in telephone charges, some ISPs offer 32 kbps connects as an option. Does this qualify as broadband? The bandwidth is not at all broad in this case, and you may actually take more time to download software or browse the Web than you would on a good dial-up connection. But then, you do save a packet on telephone charges.

How do you choose between service providers? You may not have much of a choice here. It’s your cable TV provider who’ll double up as your Internet over cable provider. In the case of DSL, too, the market hasn’t become big enough for competition yet. Most service providers currently operate in mutually exclusive territories.

What about the choice between cable and DSL? Here again, the story is more or less the same. If you’re lucky enough to have a choice between cable and DSL, and with other things like backbone and gateway bandwidths of service providers being equal, DSL may work out to be better and with cable in the long run. This is because cable is a shared media. That is, the cable that comes to your house runs to your neighbors’ too. As more and more users are added to the segment of cable that you’re on, the available bandwidth will get shared between all of them.

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