Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) Am I the only one ??
At 12:12 PM 9/29/98 , Phillip Vandry wrote:
>> As Matt pointed out, this is as expected. With K56Flex connections, the
>> symbol rates supported for the upstream direction allowed upto 33.6
>
>I'm probably not the only one who doesn't know...
>
>What exactly is a "symbol"?
Ouch ;-)
Symbols kinda correlate to "speed" of a connection.
Quoting, way out of context, (so please take a look at the referenced page):
http://www.nb.rockwell.com/K56flex/whitepapers/k56whitepaper.html
>In the early days of modems, these tokens were called "baud" in honor of the
>French inventor Emile Baudot who, in 1875, invented a 5 bit code for
>representing the alphabet. Each 5 bits were a token communicating a letter
>of the alphabet or a control code. Recently, however, the term baud has
>become corrupted in common usage, with people using baud to mean bits per
>second.
>This is a throwback to the early days of modems when a baud carried only one
>bit (so the baud rate and the bit rate were the same). Thus, 300 bit per
>second modems became 300 baud modems in techie-talk. The problem is that
>after a baud started carrying multiple bits, people were still using baud
>to mean bits per second. For modem designers, hearing someone describe a
>modem as a "9600 baud" or a "28.8 baud" modem is like fingernails on a
>blackboard. To avoid this, the modem cognoscenti began using the term
>"symbol".
Kevin Smith (kevin@ascend.com)
Ascend Communications...
...where Network Solutions never end.
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