Bandwidth is a measurement of how much data can be transferred at a time while speed is a measurement of how fast things are doneĢ. This only matters though if you have enough bandwidth as low latencies without enough bandwidth would still result in a very slow connection.ġ. It is also important that your latency is low, to ensure that the information reaches you quickly enough. Even with the same activity, downloading is often more consumed than uploading. Most users spend far more time downloading (including browsing web pages or multimedia files) than uploading. To obtain the best possible speed for your network or Internet connection, it is not enough to have a high bandwidth connection. As upload and download speed explained, due to the opposite direction, download differs from upload. Latency can’t be upgraded easily as it requires that any noise be minimized as well as the amount of time that it takes for packets to move from source to destination and vice versa. Upgrading your bandwidth would probably not help since it would no longer be used. In addition to the download speed, the upload speed essentially determines the capacity and performance for an internet connection. Even if you have a lot of bandwidth, you may experience choppy voice transmission or response lag if your latency is too high. Advertisement High upload speeds are typically specified in multiples such as kilobit per second and megabit per second. In these cases, latency or response time is more important than having more bandwidth. Theyll also measure something called ping, which is the time it takes to send data to a. This is true when you talk about real time applications like VoIP or online gaming. These sites will measure both your download speed and upload speed. This is also applicable when you are browsing the Internet as greater bandwidth would result in web pages loading faster and video streaming to be smoother.īut in certain cases, speed and bandwidth do not literally mean the same thing. Put simply, download speed is how quickly your Internet connection can retrieve data from the Internet (web pages, video, cat photos, etc.) and upload speed is how quickly your Internet connection can send data from your devices up to the Internet (uploading video to YouTube, sending documents via email, etc.) Netflix.
The file would be therefore be downloaded faster. Greater bandwidth means that more of the file is being transferred at any given time. In computing, speed and bandwidth are often used interchangeably since they often mean the same thing.Ī very good example when bandwidth would directly correlate to speed is when you are downloading a file across the network or Internet. Speed is simply a description of how fast things can be done. This is often measured in bits per second with common values expressed in thousands (kilobits per second), millions (megabits per second), and in billions (gigabits per second). In computing, bandwidth is often used to indicate the amount of data that is being, or can be, transferred at a given time. It is widely used in analog technologies like radio transmission, acoustics, and many others.
Bandwidth is a very old term that predates the advent of computers and all other digital technologies.