Routers are no exception to the growth experienced by technology as a whole. With all the improvements in these devices it can be difficult to keep up with what is best and the vocabulary and terms required to understand don’t help things either. Let’s try to understand a little better by looking at what is different between “broadband” and “narrowband” routers.
Modems and routers have been around a little while but most people were first exposed to modems. The first modems look a bit ancient compared to the ones we have now and were measured in kilobits per second or kbps. They moved from 14kbs, to 28kbsp, to 56kbps. Things have changed since then. However, these older modems used to connect to the telephone line and were considered “narrowband”.
We’re not talking about modems though, we’re talking about routers, and today most routers are broadband. These broadband routers usually connect to the high speed internet through cable or DSL.
We’ve touched a bit on the subject but what’s the real difference between broadband and narrowband? Looking at it in simple terms, it’s the frequency band over which a device can operate. A broadband router uses a wider range of frequencies than a narrowband router.
Let’s take a look at an analogy to try to make this a bit clearer. There are many broadband and narrow band devices you come by everyday. A tuning fork, for example, is a narrow band device, commonly resonating at exactly 440Hz (middle A). This narrowband device is great for guitarists who want to tune their “A” string to a “narrow band” as close to “A” as possible. A human on the other hand can sing many notes. You might therefore say a human has a “wider band” of frequencies than a tuning fork and therefore could be termed a broadband device.
Understanding the difference between broadband and narrowband is interesting but how is it important? Well, broadband devices are typically faster! Why?
Let’s take another look at our analogy.
Now consider trying to send two streams of data at the same time. Two tuning forks at the same time are hard to tell apart. However two singers at once are easy to differentiate.
Now let’s digitize our singers and tuning forks. “Ones” and “zeros” will refer to “on” and “off”. If both tuning forks are “on” it’s really hard to tell compared to just one “on” since they are both “on” at the same frequency. On the other hand we can have many singers “on” or “off” at the same time and we can tell them all apart since they sing different frequencies. Since forks can only send one stream of data versus many we would consider tuning forks to be “narrowband” and singers or a choir to be “wideband”.
Narrowband devices just can’t stream as much data as wideband devices. Broadband devices are technologically a bit more complicated but they have become fairly common place.
If you are looking to buy a router, make sure you check AJ Jensen’s excellent free guide to buying a travel router, or check out his small wireless router web site.