Explained: The Shannon limit
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 - 10:14
in Physics & Chemistry
It's the early 1980s, and you`re an equipment manufacturer for the fledgling personal-computer market. For years, modems that send data over the telephone lines have been stuck at a maximum rate of 9.6 kilobits per second: if you try to increase the rate, an intolerable number of errors creeps into the data.