If you think of data
being transmitted in terms of traffic, a low-bandwidth connection would be a single-lane, one-way
road, and a high-bandwidth connection would be a ten-lane highway. Bottlenecks due to low bandwidth
are becoming a rare occurrence. The types of activities that could saturate bandwidth and affect performance
are massive data transfers or too many systems performing sizeable network transfers at
once. Bandwidth is currently (at the time of this writing) measured in megabits per second (Mbps).
A home DSL connection might provide a download speed of 1.5 Mbps. This is not a measure of speed;
this is a measure of how much data can be transferred simultaneously. High numbers are best when
referring to bandwidth. One other caveat with bandwidth is that there can be separate download bandwidth
and upload bandwidth. Downloading a large file might occur quickly, but uploading to another
location might take significantly longer.
Sticking with the traffic analogy, latency occurs when you have stop signs or traffic lights on the
highway. A ten-lane highway won??™t help much if there??™s a stoplight every two miles.
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