Bandwidth, Speed and a Misconception
Let’s start using a metaphor or say analogy to understand the concept. Let us assume two sorts of pipes, one wider and the other narrow. Imagine that water is flowing from both the pipes. Which will flow faster? It’s obvious that the water in wider pipe since the wider can offer much speed than the other.
So, applying the concept to networking, the maximum speed that can be offered or provided by the network is it’s bandwidth . And the rate at which the data is actually transmitted is our Internet’s or Network speed ! That is the common misconception for the bandwidth and Speed of the network. This misconception may be from the advertisements from the ISP, showing the speed of the network which is actually the bandwidth. Let’s dive little deeper to the details of Bandwidth.
Bandwidth describes the maximum data transfer rate of a network or Internet connection. It measures how much data can be sent over a specific connection in a given amount of time, ex. Mbps. This speed varies with respect to the physical equipment used and the ISP (Internet Service Provider). The data often flow through several connections to reach destination, in which sometimes the network causes a bottleneck due to smaller bandwidth. This issue may not be between the servers and the Internet carriers but can be between us and the ISP.
