Bandwidth??

Question

what is bandwidth? and what's the difference between monthly bandwidth and your overall bandwidth?

Answer 1

When I worked with an internet company, we got this question alot. Bandwidth can be described as a pipe that carries liquids. You can carry a little bit of liquid through a big pipe, but you can't carry more than the capacity of the pipe. You can carry different kinds of liquid, belonging to different people, but the pipe doesn't get any bigger.

Say you have (this isn't a typical amount but for example) 1Mbps service. This is one Megabit per second. That means that one megabit  of information (megabit is a measurement unit.. like one pound. One mile. One ounce) can travel in a second  to and from your computer. (so.. like 10km/h.. its a vector)... Its kind of like an amount of information that can be transfered in a given time.

So we will use 1MBps. Thats your overall bandwith.

Now, If you have 1MBps, that means in 5 second, you would have used 5MB. If you have a monthly bandwidth limit, that means that you would add up the total amount of information you transfered. Maybe its 100Mb (it will be much higher, but thats an example).. Now just because you have 1MBps service does not mean it takes 100 seconds to get to 100Mb because you are not neccessarily using the whole 1MB every second. You may only be using a quarter of that... You will rarely use the maximum...

Does that make sense? so your overall bandwidth is your speed, or the most amount of information you can send or recieve at once (how big the pipe is)...

your month bandwidth  is the total amount of information you can send or recieve in a month (the total amount of liquid going through the pipe in a month);...

.. Get it? Email me and I can maybe explain better if you want :P

Answer 2

In computer networking and computer science, digital bandwidth or just bandwidth is the capacity for a given system to transfer data over a connection.

It is measured as a bit rate expressed in in bits/s or multiples of it (kb/s Mb/s etc.). Digital bandwidth should not be confused with the network throughput, which is the average rate of successful data transfer through a connection. It should also be distinguished from "data transfer", which is the quantity of data transferred over a given period of time.