Race for Bandwidth: Understanding Data Transmission

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 missi

Wow, this is the best book I've ever read on a technological subject. If you are a non-technical person and want to know how your phone, cell phone, fax, modem,TV, radio, internet work in layman's terms; this is your book!. Better yet the book does all that in under 200 pages. Oh yeah, it also tells explains bandwidth and how we're never going to have enough despite what you may have heard about the coming "broadband revolution". Although I've been involved in professional video production for the last 25 years in the non-technical area, I finally understand how a TV signal is transmitted and received after reading this book. I take back all the bad things I ever said about Microsoft, because they're the ones who published this outstanding book. I'm sadden that the author has past away. He had a unique ability to take very complicated stuff and explain it to liberal arts majors like myself and it's too bad he won't be around to write more. His clear thinking and economy of words is in very short supply in the technical book area...kind of like bandwidth.

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!

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 Bandwid