Latency and Bandwidth – What Are They and How Do They Affect You

When talking about internet services, you may hear two common terms: bandwidth and latency. If you aren’t too tech-savvy, you might’ve assumed that they mean the same thing and that the words are just interchangeable. However, that isn’t the case. Bandwidth isn’t the same as latency, and both refer to very different things!

So, if you’re here today to learn more about what bandwidth and latency really mean, stick around! Let’s talk about that:

What Is Bandwidth?

It’s important to note that bandwidth isn’t the same as speed. When talking about internet speeds, you usually hear megabytes per second (Mb/s), which is the amount of data that can be transferred per second.

For instance, if the speed is 100 Mb/s, it means that your internet speed is 100,000,000 bits per second.

However, bandwidth isn’t only about speed. It’s also about the width. In other words, it is the capacity pipeline of the connection through which the data is sent. The bigger the bandwidth, the more data can pass, but of course, there are many factors that can cause data to be congested, much like a highway and traffic!

How Does Bandwidth Affect Me?

Bandwidth is what determines how fast the service you’re using will process. If you want to use a service that requires a lot of bandwidth, such as video calls, HD video content, or video games, you will need a very fast and stable connection.

The most common example of a service that uses a lot of bandwidth is, of course, the internet. As you probably know, the internet is a worldwide system of computers that connects billions of people from all around the world. This system is what makes it possible for people to connect to the internet and to use the services that are offered on it. However, the internet demands a lot of bandwidth. As a matter of fact, it is not possible to have a high-quality internet connection without a lot of bandwidth.

If you have a low bandwidth connection, you will experience a lot of lags, and your connection will be unstable. This is especially true if you play video games online. When playing video games online, you usually need a high quantity and quality of packets of data to be transferred.

What Is Latency?

Now let’s talk about latency. If you have ever used the internet, then you have probably heard about this term before. As you have read above, latency is the time it takes for a packet to travel from one source to another. Basically, latency is the time between when you send a request and when you get confirmation that it was received.

For an internet connection, latency can be defined by the number of milliseconds it takes to request a packet and the number of milliseconds it takes to receive it. If it takes 100 milliseconds to send a packet and 200 milliseconds to receive it, the latency is 300 milliseconds.

How Does Latency Affect Me?

So, if you want to know why latency is important, you need to know that it determines how fast the service will respond to your commands. For example, if it takes half a second to request a certain website and half a second to actually load the website, you will experience lag.

Latency is not important only in gaming, though. It is also important in things like video calls and video conferencing. Anytime you need to send data from one source to another, latency will affect you.

Conclusion

Put simply, bandwidth refers to how much data can be streamed at once, and latency refers to how long data can travel from one point to the other. Both of these factors, however, will affect the quality of internet you have, and so by understanding these two, you can quickly understand which of the two are the problems that stand in the way. For example, if you’re having a hard time downloading things quickly, bandwidth may be the issue. On the other hand, if you are experiencing a lot of delays in your video games, latency is the problem!

With that in mind, you can make the necessary upgrades, and changes to your internet setup to improve your online experience!

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