This time, let’s think of bandwidth as a single-lane road and throughput as cars. Since bandwidth is fixed (to the amount your ISP provides), sending more data than it can handle will create congestion. How congested your network is directly affects your throughput. And that distance is one of its most significant factors. But other factors affect it along the way.ĭepending on what you’re trying to reach, your request might go through dozens of routers along the way.Įach of them will slow the data down a little bit while it receives it and figures out where to send it next.Īs you can imagine, this means latency can never be eliminated entirely. įor our purpose, it is how long it takes for your computer to reach a remote server (to access a website, for example).ĭata travels pretty quickly, at 2/3rds of the speed of light, to be exact. Latency is the amount of time it takes for data to go from one point to another. Let’s take a look at all these different things that crowd our data “pipes”. The goal here is to “clean” the pipe as much as we can, so your throughput is always as close to your bandwidth as possible. So, while water could travel faster if the pipe were clean (bandwidth), it does the best it can at that particular moment (throughput). And cracks that lose some of the data in the way, known as packet loss. There are factors along the way your data travels that slow it down, like latency and congestion. And if the pipe has some cracks, you could even lose some of the water while it goes through it. If the pipe is new and clean, water will fill the pipe as much as possible and come out the other end fast.īut if the pipe is full of blockages and debris, the amount of water coming out of the other end will be much slower. Think of bandwidth as a pipe and throughput as the water going through it. How Are Bandwidth & Throughput Different? This is the difference between bandwidth (the 500 Mbps your ISP provided) and throughput (the 100 Mbps real-life speed you get). You might notice that even though your internet service provider gives you a, let’s say, 500 Mbps connection, a speed test says you barely reach 100 Mbps. You will find that throughput is frequently measured in bits per second, but some people might prefer to use data per second. It is the real-time measurement of how much data traveled through your network for a specific task. Throughput tells you how much data your network did handle at a particular time. This gives the impression of a faster connection, but the speed at which said data is traveling is still the same. But this just means that your network is now able to handle more data in the same amount of time. Sure, you’ll notice websites load faster, and downloads are much quicker. Let’s say sometime later you decide to keep the same router and devices, but you upgrade to a 500 Mbps plan. If you sign up for a 300 Mbps plan, that is the maximum amount of data your network will be able to handle at any given time. The broadband “speed” your internet service provider advertises is actually the bandwidth they are giving you for your network. So, what does this mean? Let’s take a look at a simple example. It is usually measured in bits (bps), megabits (Mbps), or gigabits (Gbps) per second. It is the maximum transfer capacity available for you to use. What Is Bandwidth?īandwidth tells you how much data your network could theoretically handle. Let’s see what each of these terms really means and how they depend on one another. Which can be a crucial mistake if your goal is to increase network performance. The fine line between what differentiates them makes it easy to mix them up. Bandwidth and throughput are confusing terms mainly because their definitions are very similar, but not the same.
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