"Helen Coonan, our Minister of Communications and Information Technology demonstrated live on TV on at least two occasions she did not even know what bandwidth was."
"Bandwidth" is like happiness in the old song,"different things to different people"
To those of us who were brought up in the era when you actually learnt stuff,instead of just being "tech savvy",it means "occupied frequency spectrum".
This had a direct relationship to data rate--a 5MHz bandwidth bearer could carry signals with frequency components out to 5MHz.
It always meant "occupied spectrum",though!
With technical developments in modulation techniques,frequency compression,& so on,it became possible to send material which previously occupied a much wider spectrum in a much narrower bandwidth.
Computer people,never backward at stuffing up old established terminology,seized upon the term "bandwidth" to refer to the "virtual bandwidth" of the compressed signal,or "what you could send down it".
People trying to refer to what we happily used to call "bandwidth" have to say "occupied spectrum",because the "tech savvy " generation will get confused.
So,what is bandwidth?