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nullrecord t1_j9v9jkz wrote

Reply to comment by taunugget in ELI5: Why do we only use 1 and 0 for binary? Could we create a trinary system introducing an extra '2'? by No-Mammoth-1638

Sure there is - more storage, or more bandwidth.

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taunugget t1_j9vavfy wrote

You can get more storage/bandwidth by just adding more binary bits. To achieve the same result with a ternary system would require way more cost and effort.

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nullrecord t1_j9vc0ox wrote

Without that you would never have ADSL or 4G or wifi. Instead of sending 1 bit at the time over the wire, the "bit" can have 64 states, representing 6 bits at a time - a 6-fold increase in bandwidth.

See here for a bit more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-shift_keying#Quadrature_phase-shift_keying_.28QPSK.29

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taunugget t1_j9vdphu wrote

That's a good point, lots of transceivers do encode/decode signals with multiple levels. I was only thinking about the processing and storage of data. Even a qam-64 symbol needs to be converted to binary to do anything useful with it.

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nullrecord t1_j9ve7jy wrote

Sure, but as someone wrote in the other comment, even SSD stores multiple voltages per cell to increase storage capacity.

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