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Is the interconnect capacitance in a transmission cable is having an impact on the maximum data transmitting rate ?

Or is it only producing "crosstalk" ?

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It has an effect, since the capacitance of the line has to be charged/discharged in order to produce an edge in the signal, and has also an effect on reflection of the signal – clabacchio♦ Apr 2 '12 at 12:22
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That'd be a good answer clabacchio. I'd vote for it. – AngryEE Apr 2 '12 at 17:01

1 Answer

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@clabacchio is correct, transmission line capacitance has a tremendous effect on data transmission rate.

The effect of the capacitance increases with frequency. Take the following example. As you can see due to capacitance the blue output voltage is showing distortion.

enter image description here

Now let us increase the signal's frequency:

enter image description here

If this was a communication/data signal it would be useless due to the effect of the transmission line's capacitance to the ground.

A famous example of transmission line capacitance is on the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The transmission speed was so low that a a single character took 2 minutes to transmit and the first message took 17 hours to be sent!

Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable#Communication_speeds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegrapher%27s_equations

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