Thursday, June 6, 2019

electromagnetic radiation - An apparent contradiction in various explanations of frequency bands and data bandwidth


From wikipedia:


"A key characteristic of bandwidth is that any band of a given width can carry the same amount of information, regardless of where that band is located in the frequency spectrum. For example, a 3 kHz band can carry a telephone conversation whether that band is at baseband (as in a POTS telephone line) or modulated to some higher frequency."


(my emphasis)


From a previous post on this site:
Why is channel capacity a factor of bandwidth instead of frequency?


Question extract: "According to this formula [Shannon-Hartley], a fixed-frequency signal would have the same performance regardless of whether it's at high or low frequency..[]... For example say my bandwidth is 1Hz at a fixed frequency of 1Hz. Compare this with a bandwidth of 1Hz at a frequency of 2.4GHz. It's plainly obvious that I can cram way more bits into 2.4 x 109 cycles/second than I can with just 1/sec."


Extract from one answer: "Certainly you could". (note that the answer goes on to discuss signal modulation and energy, at which point I'm lost).



Question


I'm in way over my head on this topic, and the list of things I don't understand is embarrassingly long, despite having carefully read through the many related posts on this site.


However, the Wikipedia entry seems intuitively wrong. If we are using electro-magnetic waves to transmit 1s and 0s, then more waves per second must surely translate into a higher rate of 1s and 0s transmitted. So, to my simple mind, a 3 KHz band at 2.4 GHz must be able to carry more 1s and 0s per second than a 3 KHz band at say 4 KHz.


Is there any way of explaining this to someone who studied economics, rather than engineering or physics?




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