Bandwidth is one of the most important and one of the most confusing topics in telecommunications today. If you keep up to date with the telecommunication news, you would have come across conflicting reports regarding bandwidth. There are a lot of people claiming “ bandwidth is cheap ” and probably as many people claiming “ it is extremely important to conserve bandwidth.” So, what’s the deal? Do networks today have enough bandwidth or not?
The problem is there is no single correct answer to that. The answer depends on where you are in the network. Consider the core of the IP and the PSTN networks: the two most widely deployed networks today. The bandwidth available at the core of these networks is much more than required: bandwidth therefore is cheap at the core of the network. Similarly the dawn of 100 Mbps and Gigabit Ethernet has made bandwidth cheap even in the access network (the part of the network that connects the end-user to the core). The wireless medium, however, is a little different and follows a simple rule: bandwidth is always expensive. This stems from the fact that in almost all countries the wireless spectrum is controlled by the government. Only certain bands of this spectrum are allowed for commercial use, thus making bandwidth costly in the wireless world. All protocols designed for the wireless medium therefore revolve around this central constraint.
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