Contemporary communications

buses
- With better fabrication processes we are able to put more transistors and tracks on a smaller space and are therefore increasing both the word size and available storage capacity in processors.
- Compression has allowed us to reduce the size of the data getting sent over serial buses, which has in turn reduced transmission times.
wireless standards
- Bluetooth and WiFi have came a long way since they were introduced and are much available than they were only a few years ago. The adoption of these standards has allowed a new range of connected devices and these have increased the uptake of multimedia.
increasing bandwidth
- It wasn’t that long ago homes had 14,000bps connection to the Internet, broadband and optical fibre has increased the amount of bandwidth homes and business have. This has in turn increased demand for large files like video and high quality images.
USB
- USB has went from 1.5Mbps to 5Gbps in 12 years. This standard interface is by far the most popular wired connection type on computers. It allows the computer to be attached to large range of peripherals, some useful and some not so much.
Firewire
- or ieee 1394 as it is known on non Apple devices, supports speeds up to 3.2Gbps and is mostly used to connect storage devices. Apple is phasing this out favour of Intel’s new thunderbolt standard.

Computing