Definition of Broadband - Is there one?!What's the definition of broadband? There's so much hype around broadband, high speed broadband, mobile broadband, wireless broadband, all generally referring to the same thing, that many stop to ask the very good question: "What exactly is broadband?"! Most of us have heard of it, and many of us think it's a good/better thing and want it, but really, what is the definition of broadband? Interestingly, as common and popular as it is, and with all of the discussion around mobile broadband services, and pay as you go broadband, there actually isn't a standard, universally agreed to definition of broadband. It's actually quite amazing when you think about it. In general, broadband can be defined as one single medium 
carrying many channels (and a large
range of frequencies) at once over
long distances. for example, in the world of television, a
broadband service provides dozens of channels over one single cable
delivered to your home. In terms of the Internet, it can
carry
data, video, and audio all at once. So before broadband, you
wouldn't be able to use Skype to have conference calls, or watch
streaming television over your Internet connection. Broadband
technology enabled the delivery of these types of services.Many people like to define broadband in terms of the speed that it can deliver. This approach is logical and certainly makes a lot of sense. The problem is that no one can seem to agree on what that speed is or should be! Here's a few examples of common speed-based definitions of broadband:
 What
everyone CAN agree on is that there is no agreement on the definition
of broadband ;-). As a result, many people loosely define it
as
any high speed Internet access. With all of the
wireless
broadband technologies currently available,
while such a definition is nice and generic, it certainly does not
provide any insight for those of us who want to compare and evaluate
the existing broadband technologies; oh well.Webster's definition is: 1
: operating at, responsive to, or
comprising a wide band of frequencies <a
broadband radio antenna> 2 : of, relating to, or being a high-speed communications network and especially one in which a frequency range is divided into multiple independent channels for simultaneous transmission of signals (as voice, data, or video)
Conclusion! I believe that it doesn't really matter what people debate in terms of a formal technical definition of broadband or what particular speed is required. For me it comes down to what you can do with a particular broadband connection. For example, how long does it take to view an image that's downloaded online? Can you listen to streaming music and have it come through smoothly? Can you have a phone conversation with good quality audio using VoIP (ex. Skype)? Or better yet, can you have a live video conference without skipping images and shotty speech? These are the types of real life activities that really tell you the capabilities of your broadband connection. So whether it's officially 2.5G, 3G, or 4G (ex. WiMAX, LTE), it doesn't really matter! Wait, there's more! Let's go beyond just the definition of broadband. Once people started getting access to broadband, mobile broadband in particular, it became clear that we could now download megabytes, and even hundreds of megabytes of data without long, irritating wait times. Companies then starting selling customers buckets of data. Initially data plans were actually unlimited because people were fearful of going over their data bucket and ending up with a huge overage bill at the end of the month. but now consumers are more savvy, and getting used to how much data things take. However, it's still not always clear, and with prepaid broadband plans, knowing how much data you need is important, because it can drastically change the price and value of a given provider's plan, and definitely change your purchase decision. Many broadband carriers will provide a list of estimated activities that a user can accomplish with a certain amount of megabytes. They use real world, human language to help people better understand. Here's a commonly accepted example of what you'll see companies claim that I think is very useful:
One thing to keep in mind when looking at this table is that there are a lot of assumptions (ex. it's based on the average email size), and that the numbers listed under each activity are if you're only doing that particular activity. So if you're watching a video and doing email, you'll get a combination of these numbers. But generally speaking, these is a decent way to think about what you're getting for the data you buy, whether it's prepaid or postpaid.
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