How Do Internet Bandwidth And Speed Differ?
Priyanka Shyam
CCDE (Written) | CWNA | Cisco SCOR | CISCO SD-WAN | Technical Writer | Influencer | Multitasker | Considerate | Empathic | Excellent Communicator | Helpful
People often confuse bandwidth with speed. Some people believe that there is no difference between internet speed and bandwidth. Others believe that if we increase the bandwidth, the speed will increase as well. Does this make sense? Here is a brief summary of everything discussed in this article.
?When we talk about how fast an internet connection is, we have been using the terms bandwidth and speed interchangeably. Have you ever considered that the two of them might be different, although using one in place of the other won't cause any harm or confusion?
There is a technical difference between internet speed and bandwidth. In network terms, bandwidth refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time, whereas speed refers to the time it takes to reach data (in packets) from source to destination. Therefore, bandwidth is a fixed one, whereas network speed can vary. Network speed depends on many factors, like the protocol used to send data, the efficiency of the server, network coordination, etc.
The user feels the Internet speed by downloading files from the server to his computer. High bandwidth helps to download files faster, but there are other factors as well. He may feel that his Internet speed is slow if he is downloading a large file (such as a video) from a slow server. His Internet bandwidth is adequate, but the response delay of the remote server limits the speed of data transfer.
Internet speed is also affected by the protocol used. Depending on whether the connection is using a connection-oriented protocol (TCP) or a connectionless protocol (UDP), the speed of data transfer will vary. Due to the lack of error detection and synchronization, UDP data transfers are always faster than TCP data transfers. Here Internet bandwidth is a constant but the Internet speed varies.
If you want to correlate this in day-to-day life then let’s take an example to describe it in ore simpler way.
Let's say you're driving on a four-lane highway at a maximum speed of 300 km/h in a car with four lanes. It doesn't matter how many lanes there are on the road, your car can only go 300km/hr. When there are four lanes on the same road, your family members with their own cars can share the road and reach the same destination faster than if there was just one lane where they would have to queue up. Likewise for our broadband service, with a higher bandwidth you can actually do more at the same time or share the connection with your family members using a bigger pipe.
Conclusion :
There is a difference between Internet speed and Internet bandwidth. In contrast to Internet speed, which varies depending on the remote server and the protocol used to send data, Internet bandwidth is the one assigned by your ISP and is a constant (as long as your ISP maintains its promise). Data bandwidth refers to the amount of data you can download or upload from your computer, while data speed refers to the speed at which the data can be uploaded or downloaded. Different ISPs have different bandwidth limits for downloading and uploading. The upload bandwidth is less than the download bandwidth in most cases as most of the activities done by users require downloading of data from the internet.
Tech Analyst/Network Architect/Producer
1 年Here is what a real content creator would write Link: Network Zen: The Duality of Bandwidth — EtherealMind - https://etherealmind.com/network-zen-the-duality-of-bandwidth/?
Vice President Of Technology at Rajant Corporation
1 年This is particularly true for 802.11 data rates vs. real world throughput. 75% is pretty common. Bonding often only gets to a high total as a combination of streams as it speeds streams over the links. Anything that changes ordering will break many UDP applications and while TCP can reorder it will not like it.
@dtaht:matrix.org - Truly speeding up the Net, one smart ISP at a time
1 年https://www.bitag.org/documents/BITAG_latency_explained.pdf
Associate Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville
1 年While I applaud your effort to distinguish between speed and bandwidth, the situation is considerably more complex than you have described. 1. Any path between two points through the Internet has a "maximum bandwidth", which is the rate at which data can pass over it in a standard unit of time. The maximum bandwidth (measured in Gb/s) is determined by the minimum capacity of any link along the path and, as you indicate, does not change *unless the path does*. 2. At any point in time there is competing traffic along any path through the Internet. The effect of this competing traffic can reduce the "bandwidth available" to you along that path, which changes. 3. There is a fixed minimum time that a packet requires to flow along a specific path through the Internet, called the "latency" along that path. Latency is measured in seconds and is inversely related to "speed". 4. Competing traffic can also increase "effective latency" along a path, so it varies. 5. "Throughput" is the highly variable rate at which a stream or file is delivered along an Internet path (also measured in Gb/s) is a complex function of available bandwidth, effective latency, error rate, the protocol used and processor load at the endpoints.
Leader, Connectivity Engineering || CCIE-SP #64222
1 年Remind me off those old days where we kept on explaining this plain difference to Airtel Lease Line customers (off-course adamant ones ) Amzad Ansari