Bandwidth
The width of a frequency range allocated for a communication channel, directly impacting the maximum achievable data rate.
Two senses of "bandwidth" float around, and mixing them up causes real confusion. In RF terms it means the width of a channel in the frequency domain — a 100 MHz NR carrier, say. Colloquially people also use "bandwidth" to mean data rate, but strictly that is throughput.
The reason the RF sense matters: channel width is the single biggest lever on capacity. Shannon's law ties achievable rate to bandwidth almost linearly, so doubling the channel roughly doubles the ceiling, all else equal. That is exactly why 5G chases wide carriers — up to 100 MHz in sub-6 GHz and 400 MHz in mmWave — while LTE was typically stuck at 20 MHz per carrier and had to bond several together with carrier aggregation to get more.
Frequently asked questions
- Is bandwidth the same thing as speed?
- Not quite. Bandwidth is the width of the radio channel; speed (throughput) is how many bits you actually push through it. A wide channel raises the ceiling, but the real rate also depends on signal quality, modulation order, the number of MIMO layers, and how many users are sharing the cell. A wide channel with poor SINR can underperform a narrow one with a clean signal.
Related terms
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