Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Communication:

The advantages and disadvantages of digital communication are as follows,

Digital communication have the following advantages:

1. The digital communication systems are simpler and cheaper compared to analog communication systems because of the advancements made in the IC technologies.

2. In digital communication, the speech, video and other data may be merged and transmitted over a common channel using multiplexing.

3. Using data encryption, only permitted receivers may be allowed to detect the transmitted data. This property is of its most importance in military applications.

4. Since the transmission is digital and the channel encoding is used, the noise does not accumulate from repeater to repeater in long distance communications.

5. Since the transmitted signal is digital in nature, a large amount of noise interference may be tolerated.

6. Since in digital communication, channel coding is used, the errors may be detected and corrected in the receivers.

7. Digital communication is adaptive to other advanced branches of data processing such as digital signal processing, image processing and data compression etc.

Disadvantages:

Although digital communication offers so many advantages as mentioned above, it has some drawbacks also. However, the advantages of digital communication outweigh the disadvantages given below :

1. Because of analog to digital conversion, the data rate becomes high and therefore, more transmission bandwidth is required for digital communication.

2. Digital communication needs synchronization in case of synchronous modulation.