Friday Donuts

Dear Members and constituents, Ever wonder why a T-1 has 1,536 Kilobits per second of capacity? Why not a round number? Even if you were to use Kilo bytes per second you'd come up with 192 KB per second. In case you were wondering, it all comes down to the dawn of digital voice communications. In order to reconstruct a sound, the samples taken can be no less than half of the frequenc y of the sound we are trying to represent. In normal conversation the human voice seldom exceeds 16 KHz and therefore sampling it 8,000 times per second would be sufficient for both sides to understand each other. They also decided 256 levels (8 bits) per sample provided sufficient information. Of course 8,000 samples per second at 8 bits per sample provide us with 64,000 bits per second, the bandwidth of a phone call. That is, of course, why your voice on a phone conversation sounds a little "tinny" and does not have quite the quality of, say, a CD. You take 24 of these together and, voilà, ...