Signals traveling through transmission media can be impaired by attenuation, distortion, and noise.
Attenuation refers to the loss of signal strength over distance due to energy being absorbed by the transmission medium. Distortion occurs when different frequency components of a composite signal travel at different speeds, causing them to arrive with different phases. Noise refers to unwanted signals added to the transmission from sources like thermal effects, electromagnetic interference, crosstalk, and impulses. The signal-to-noise ratio is used to measure transmission quality by comparing the power of the signal to the power of noise.