I need bandwidth!! Sure about that?

I have to be honest. I hark back to my analogue electronics past where the term bandwidth only meant something in analogue frequency terms. If I recall it was the frequency difference between -3db signal strength. Something like that!

In the digital age it means volume of data transmission. You hear people boasting about their deal from their local provider for 300Mbps or 1Gbps for x clams/dollars/euros per month.

What does 1Gbps literally mean? It means the wire can sustain a sustained data rate of 1 Giga Bits Per Second, nothing more and nothing less. I like analogies. This is like a 100 lane highway, lots of capacity, lots!

However, what we really crave is SPEED, not throughput. I want a website to respond quickly and do my part by ensuring my link is fast! I don't necessarily need to transfer a lot of data, I just need it to be fast. Using the highway analogy, a car can go fast, not that the highway can support a lot of cars.

Why do laptops need a 1Gbps interface, when even something like Microsoft Teams, which craves bandwidth, only needs 1 Mbps, not 1Gbps. They need it because the small amount of data can move faster on the wire, and get a fast response from the server.

So when you insist on throughput, just know you should be asking for speed, not throughput. It is ok for 1000 people to share a big pipe because you never need high throughputs, but you do need the speed.

Ask the right question!