Telecoms Analogy

[#1]

I was trying explain telecommunication bandwidth to someone today using roads and cars as a metaphor. The road is the physical circuit, and cars are the ones and zeros being transmitted along it. Once the you scale things up in this analogy, the end results are both awesome and terrifying.

The smallest telecoms unit is the E0 which is the equivalent of a single telephone line capable of 64 kilobits per second (64,000 ones and zeros per second). So in our analogy this would be a B road with a single lane in each direction, carrying 64,000 cars per second each travelling at approximately 1.15 million kilometers per hour.
Of course in the real world a single car travelling at 1000 times the speed of sound would vaporize everything for hundreds of miles in every direction from the air friction alone. But for the sake of this analogy we can ignore that and move on up the hierarchy.