Industry Expert Blogs

Bit Error Rates and Snoopy’s rejection letters

Bit Error Rates (BER) in wired and wireless communication communicate the “allowable” or target number of errors (rejected or non-transmitted data) that can occur over some given time. Usually this is measured of a period time like a second.

Wired interfaces enable faster speeds because a hard wire has less ways it can be interfered with on the path from one product to another. Even wired interfaces like USB and Ethernet, basically any wired interface port, generates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_interference which can interfere with data transmission inside or outside the device. For example, Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) in PCs is tightly regulated by the FCC in the U.S. For USB specifically, the BER tolerance is low because it’s a wired interface.

The FCC does not regulate hair dryers and thus can emit enough EMI to bring down a nuclear power plant.