With so much new wireless capacity coming in the 5G era, with more advanced radios, better air interfaces, multiplexing (optical and electrical), one might ask whether Shannon’s Law, a big issue in the days of constrained bandwidth, is much of a practical issue anymore.
Shannon’s law, conceived by mathematician Claude Shannon, is a way to calculate the theoretical highest amount of information transmitted by a communications system based on the laws of thermodynamics (noise).
Shannon's Law states that the maximum attainable error-free data speed, in bits per second (bps), is a function of the signal-to-noise ratio and bandwidth.
As a practical matter, this is a big deal when bandwidth is limited. It ceases to be much of an issue when bandwidth is plentiful, as will be the case in the 5G era.
Shannon’s law was a bigger issue when wired channels used only copper media, and when mobile bandwidth was constrained. Nobody worries about it in the Wi-Fi context. And one never hears talk of Shannon constraints for optical communication systems.
As the saying goes, given enough bandwidth, very high speeds are possible.
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