We’ve all listened to digital music, right? And that means you’ve probably heard of “bitrate” or come across files that have “kbps” at the end. Thing is… what does that mean? What the hell is bitrate?

This rule of thumb enables us to estimate the highest frequency to worry about for a data signal. Spoiler summary: At the Tx, it is 2.5× the bitrate. At the Rx, in a lossy channel, it is the Nyquist: ...