From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

Op 10-2-2026 om 13:19 schreef John Williamson:

On 10/02/2026 11:14, Kerr-Mudd, John wrote:

On Tue, 10 Feb 2026 11:04:22 +0000
John Williamson <johnwilliamson@btinternet.com> wrote:

"Spam's off!" was the punchline in a Monty Python sketch.

Correct; but one may have influenced the other.
RC was playing (in this case) the fagg-ash lil waitress.

Perhaps it wasn't spam. maybe eggs for egg-on-toast?

The punchline in the Balhsm cafe after the list of fillings runs out is
more or less "Rolls ate off, love" "I might as well have stayed at home"
"I don't know, it does you good to get out"...

The Monty Python sketch involves a group of Vikings songing in the
corner...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

After all these years still funny!

Rink
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:38:54 +0000, JMB99 <mb@nospam.net> wrote:

I had Netflix included with my broadband but I don't think I have ever watched any of their own stuff.

What is this week's definition of broadband?

I had a pimply faced youth at a mall outlet tell me that
broadband was Cellular 5G, I met another who worked at aother
mall outlet tell me that 5G was fiber. Broadband like turbo has a
definition but is used as a marketing term. Another geezer talked
determedly about broadband and couldn't understand why I talked
about fiber, being unaware that fiber optic cable delivered real
broadband connections.

Ofcom has complained about the marketing Dweebs selling
the rubes "Broadband".
--
The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to
fight for it. - Aneurin Bevan
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 28/01/2026 17:59, Julian Macassey wrote:

On Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:38:54 +0000, JMB99 <mb@nospam.net> wrote:

I had Netflix included with my broadband but I don't think I have ever
watched any of their own stuff.

What is this week's definition of broadband?

I had a pimply faced youth at a mall outlet tell me that
broadband was Cellular 5G, I met another who worked at aother
mall outlet tell me that 5G was fiber. Broadband like turbo has a
definition but is used as a marketing term. Another geezer talked
determedly about broadband and couldn't understand why I talked
about fiber, being unaware that fiber optic cable delivered real
broadband connections.

Ofcom has complained about the marketing Dweebs selling
the rubes "Broadband".

The original definition still holds. In the old days, we used to dial up
and use a modem to squeal and buzz along an analogue line with a series
of real connections between one end and the other. In effect, you had a
pair of wires between you and the other end. (Now known as POTS or Plain
Old Telephone System.) Then, the exchanges got digitised, but the link
from the user to the exchange was still analogue. Even early cellphone
data (1G, before it got digitised as 2G) was transmitted in analogue
form at 9600 baud. You could actually listen to cellphone calls on a
scanner, as some reporters and users quickly found out.

Then someone worked out how to use the old analogue lines to move data
more quickly. so we had a wider bandwidth available. Hence, any rapid
data transmission using digital tech from end to end is, technically, broadband, Speech was still analogue until it hit the ADAC in the exchange

More recently, optical fibre has been replacing metal wires, but both do
the same job of providing a broadband connection between points A and B.
My broadband is actually wire and fibre free between me and the
backbone. I use 4G and 5G wireless connections. It's still broadband,
though. as it is fast and not analogue along a dedicated pair of wires.

Nowadays, the ADAC functionality is in the handset (or phone adaptor),
and your router just has a network connection to what is mow part of the Internet backbone.
--
Tciao for Now!

John.
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 29/01/2026 15:17, Max Demian wrote:

On 28/01/2026 23:20, NY wrote:

On 28/01/2026 20:49, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

In the 1980s, BT sometimes used a DACS - a frequency-division
multiplexer box - to send several houses' phone lines down a single
copper pair, if pairs were in short supply. My parents have a holiday
cottage in a tiny hamlet in Wensleydale and when they first got a
phone line installed, it used a DACS. When broadband internet was
starting to be introduced, and signals outside the normal 300-3000 Hz
speech needed to be conveyed, BT had to upgrade all those lines to a
separate pair per house, because the DACS was not designed with
broadband in mind.

DACS stopped normal dial-up modems from working as well.

Ah, I didn't know that. Maybe a DACS connection had a more restricted bandwidth or introduced more distortion that a typical hard-wired line,
and this was enough to stop dial-up working. Was it a total failure to
connect or did it reduce the speed to an unusable level?

I'm trying to remember when the DACS on the phone line at the cottage
was removed, and whether I ever took my laptop to the cottage and
connected by dial-up while we had the DACS. I know I did by the end,
just before we got broadband, but maybe I didn't have a laptop during
the days of DACS.

It's hard to remember the excitement of getting a 56 kbps modem and so
getting a faster download connection than I'd got with my older 33.6
kbps one - and even that was a step up from 28.8 ones.

Mind you, I remember when 8 Mbps ADSL was the fastest that anyone could
get anywhere and needed you to be very close to the exchange. In my
case, I could have thrown a stone from my bedroom window and hit the
exchange - couldn't get much closer than that! I think by the end, some
lines and exchanges were supporting faster than 8 Mbps.

I remember that when broadband first came out, BT had to have a certain
number of confirmed orders (the "trigger level") before they would
commit to installing the equipment in an exchange, and the numbers for
our exchange were creeping up painfully slowly. One of my neighbours who worked in the comms business was in the middle of arranging a "community broadband" link with fibre to a mast on top of a hill about 20 miles
away and then dish aerials for each house. But BT suddenly abandoned the concept of trigger levels and committed to install the equipment
"everywhere".
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 01/02/2026 13:42, Richmond wrote:

BT's 2Mbps service was called broadband (2005?), but it was slower than
5g is now. Their website was saying "broadband is here" in 2002, so
imagine how slow that was.

Broadband NEVER was ANYTHING to do with download speeds.
It was used to refer to the use of wide spectrum RF as a data carrier,
rather than a single frequency, which is called NARROWBAND.

AM radio is narrowband. FM radio is narrowband. spread spectrum
frequency hopping radio is arguably broad band and that is mobile phone technology, irrespective of how fast it is. Original television was
narrow band. Digital terrestrial TV is broad band

The fact that marketing people conflated it with a larger penis, does
not change its meaning which was always technical.

What FTTP is is arguably something else again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020619040045/http://www.bt.com/index.jsp

--
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to
rule.
rCo H. L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956

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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 2026/2/1 20:19:58, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 01/02/2026 12:22, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

Sadly (in some ways), language evolves - often in ways that some of us

[]

agreement/contract (and then only in the context of that
agreement/contract).

In contracts it is customary to define *every* technical term used
within the contact to ensure there is as little legal wriggle room as possible.

It'd be interesting to hear, if anyone has any such contract in which
the term broadband is so defined, what the definition is (or was).

I'm not saying no such contract has ever existed [although I don't think
_I_ have seen one]; I'm just genuinely interested to hear that definition.

Without it, I doubt there's much point in continuing this discussion -
as several of us have said, it's used in so many ways as to be in effect meaningless. I support the suggestion that it was first coined to
describe using beyond the about 3 kHz audio band for data [which thus
was faster]; it would be interesting to find where, and by whom and why,
the term _was_ first coined. (I _suspect_ it was by a technical rather
than a marketing person.)

As far as the general public is concerned, I think the terms broadband,
(the) internet, data, wifi, cable, fibre, and probably others, are all
used interchangeably, and hazily. And by the industry too (in both
marketing and statements), which certainly doesn't help. Oh, and
politicians.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G()ALIS-Ch++(p)Ar++T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

For this star a "night on the tiles" means winning at Scrabble
- Kathy Lette (on Kylie), RT 2014/1/11-17
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 01/02/2026 23:43, NY wrote:

On 01/02/2026 20:27, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 01/02/2026 13:42, Richmond wrote:

BT's 2Mbps service was called broadband (2005?), but it was slower than
5g is now. Their website was saying "broadband is here" in 2002, so
imagine how slow that was.

Broadband NEVER was ANYTHING to do with download speeds.
It was used to refer to the use of wide spectrum RF as a data carrier,
rather than a single frequency, which is called NARROWBAND.

So it relates to the bandwidth of the unmodulated *carrier(s)* rather
that of the modulated signal? I can't remember ever hearing that
distinction when I did my Elec Eng degree. Maybe I wasn't listening...

Well I didn't encounter it much at university, but I certainly did in my
time with
GEC-Elliott-Marconi.

Why else call it 'broadband'?

Stupid name for what people would otherwise call megabit internet or
similar.

I suppose you could argue that analogue TV was broadband in the sense
that there was one carrier for the video and another 6 MHz away from it
for FM sound ;-)-a OK, maybe I'm stretching a point...

Well I agree. It was - along with VHF stereo, one of the first
technologies to multiplex two different signals over a common carrier.

What happened after -<, and probably you, left university was the
explosion in computer and digital signal processing and the application
of e,g, convolution functions and spread spectrum radio to spread bit
patterns across large areas of the spectrum.

In fact Marconis were developing this for military battlefield radios in
the 1970s. Ultimately it became what you know today as digital mobile telephony.

DSL was another example of spreading bit patters across a number of
different frequencies. .From IIRC 60KHz to 5MHz, that being as far as
you were likely to push RF down a long copper line. The spectrum was
divided into narrow bands, each one carrying perhaps as many as 5 or 6
bits depending on the noise in that band.

DSL means digital subscriber line - i.e. a long pair of copper wires...

I guess the marketing people heard the technology being described as
broad band by the engineers and misunderstood it to mean 'fast internet'
and thought it catchy.. and the rest is history

In the end what we have is now technical terms for modulation schemata
like QAM etc etc marketing terms like 4G and 5G or more literal terms
like fibre to the premises etc etc.

What actually goes down the fibre is all very technical and I am sure is taught at university now.

All I wanted to say is that there is - or was - a precise technical
definition of broadband which has very little to do with it use a a
buzzword by PFYs and marketingDroids.

Today it is about and meaningless as 'gay'....
--
"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They
always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them"

Margaret Thatcher

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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 02/02/2026 03:15, Sn!pe wrote:

J. P. Gilliver <G6JPG@255soft.uk> wrote:

[...]

With respect to RF, 'Broadband' would be more accurately called
'Wideband'. This is not relevant to the discussion of /data/ rates.

That would certainly be less ambiguous in the RF context.

In the data context, what would _you_ consider "broadband" to mean? (I'd
say either "nothing nowadays", or "a data rate significantly higher than
you could get through an audio-band-only modem", which would mean
anything from say 2M upwards.)

Yes, the latter, i.e. better than an audio modem.

...or GPRS/EDGE, the way you access the Internet on a GSM (2G) phone.
--
Max Demian
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

Julian Macassey <julian@n6are.com> wrote:

On Sun, 25 Jan 2026 08:38:54 +0000, JMB99 <mb@nospam.net> wrote:

I had Netflix included with my broadband but I don't think I have ever watched any of their own stuff.

What is this week's definition of broadband?

Two possible meanings:

1) The modulation is wideband but centred around a single frequency
(giving a wide spectrum of sidebands).

2) Multiple carriers are scattered across a wide range of frequencies (otherwise known as "spread-spectrum").


Very confusing, even before the advertising copy-writers got hold of it.
--
~ Liz Tuddenham ~
(Remove the ".invalid"s and add ".co.uk" to reply)
www.poppyrecords.co.uk
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

Op 2-2-2026 om 18:56 schreef David Woolley:

On 02/02/2026 15:14, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Take analogue TV, the audio may be considered to be on a separate
transmitted frequency, but the chroma is-a multiplexed onto the same
'channel' as the video.

The way it is specified, and the way that analogue TVs recovered the
audio, is that both audio and chroma are on sub-carriers, not one on a sub-carrier, and one as an adjacent carrier.

An analogue tv signal was transmitted via two transmitters:
One for video (vestigal sideband modulation) on the channel frequency,
One for audio on a frequency 5,5 or 6 MHz higher than video frequency.
Some TV systems used FM for audio, some used AM.
Later the BBC used NICAM for audio. (was NICAM on another frequency?)
Tugether they form the "TV-channel", with a bandwidth of about 7 MHz.
In VHF the channel width was 7 MHz (for B & G),
in UHF 8 MHz.

Chroma was modulated on a subcarrier with an exact frequency of +
4.43361875 MHz for PAL.

More info here:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analogue_TV>

Analogue TVs recover the
audio as a 6MHz signal, embedded within the demodulated vidwo, and feed
it into a 6MHz IF amplifier; they don't down convert to, say, the
10.7MHz IF typically used for FM broadcast sound.

Analogue TV receivers use an Intermediate Frequency.
For B and G-system, as used in The Netherlands and Germany
this IF filter was from about 33 to 40,5 MHz.
You were tuned correct if the video carrier was on 38,9 MHz
and the audio carrier on 33,4 MHz (B & G audio was on +5,5 MHz).
There was no 6 (or 5,5) MHz IF amplifier,
the audio was demodulated from 33,4 MHz in case of B/G.

(Note that 6Mhz is for the UK.-a Other sub-carrier frequencies were used
in other countries.)

Chroma is interesting, because, if you treat it as a single sub-carrier,
you have to treat the modulating signal as being a complex number.

I'm not sure what you mean with this.

Rink
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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 23/03/2026 19:20, Rink wrote:

An analogue tv signal was transmitted via two transmitters:
One for video (vestigal sideband modulation) on the channel frequency,
One for audio on a frequency 5,5 or 6 MHz higher than video frequency.
Some TV systems used FM for audio, some used AM.
Later the BBC used NICAM for audio. (was NICAM on another frequency?) Tugether they form the "TV-channel", with a bandwidth of about 7 MHz.
In VHF the channel width was 7 MHz (for B & G),
in UHF 8 MHz.

NICAM was on a subcarrier.

Lower power sites transposed the whole signal as video + sound + chroma
+ NICAM etc.



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From Newsgroup: uk.tech.broadcast

On 23/03/2026 19:20, Rink wrote:

There was no 6 (or 5,5) MHz IF amplifier,
the audio was demodulated from 33,4 MHz in case of B/G.

See the module at that top centre of the circuit diagram at <https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/l87rri/blackwhite_crt_tv_circuit/>;
that's the sound IF amplifier!

Also see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercarrier_method> and figure
3 in <https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Company-Publications/Aerovox/40s/Aerovox-1949-06.pdf>.

Chroma is interesting, because, if you treat it as a single sub-
carrier, you have to treat the modulating signal as being a complex
number.

I'm not sure what you mean with this.

Chroma is transmitted as a quadrature signal. There are effectively two carriers on carriers at the same frequency, but at 90 degrees apart in
phase. Describing such a system digitally, you would treat the I
component as real, and the Q component as imaginary.
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