|  | 1.5 | Digital Bandwidth
| 1.5.6 | The importance of bandwidth
Why is bandwidth important? First, bandwidth is finite. Regardless of the media, bandwidth is limited by the laws of physics. For example, the bandwidth limitations - due to the physical properties of the twisted-pair phone wires that come into many homes - is what limits the throughput of conventional modems to about 56 kbps. The bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum is finite - there are only so many frequencies in the radio wave, microwave, and infrared spectrum. Because this is so, the FCC has a whole division to control bandwidth and who uses it. Optical fiber has virtually limitless bandwidth. However, the rest of the technology to make extremely high bandwidth networks that fully use the potential of optical fiber are just now being developed and implemented. Knowing how bandwidth works, and that it is finite, can save you lots of money. For example, the cost of various connection options from Internet service providers depends, in part, on how much bandwidth, on average and at peak usage, you require. In a way, what you pay for is bandwidth. As a networking professional, you will be expected to know about bandwidth and throughput. They are major factors in analyzing network performance. In addition, as a network designer of brand new networks, bandwidth will always be one of the major design issues. There are two major concepts to understand concerning the "information superhighway". The first is that any form of information can be stored as a long string of bits. The second is that storing information as bits, while useful, is not the truly revolutionary technology. The fact that we can share those bits - trillions of them in 1 second - means modern civilization is approaching the time when any computer, anywhere in the world or in space, can communicate with any other computer, in a few seconds or less. It is not uncommon that once a person or an institution starts using a network, they eventually want more and more bandwidth. New multimedia software programs require much more bandwidth than those used in the mid-1990s. Creative programmers are busily designing new applications that are capable of performing more complex communication tasks, thus requiring greater bandwidth.