Bandwidth - What is it?

Bandwidth is a term you'll often hear people use when they are either boasting about their network or trying to sell you their network!

Bandwidth is a combination of speed and capacity. Think of a freeway. It is wide and traffic moves along it fast (well except freeways in Los Angeles). So a freeway has a lot of bandwidth. A small country road may only have a couple of lanes and be so full of potholes that only a few cars can move slowly along it.

This is good analogy to computer networks. "High Bandwidth" networks are the equivalent of "wide" and "fast" - so when you look at a video over the Internet it comes back quickly.

As of today (June 2005) most home users will have "broadband" which is a marketing term covering several different kinds of high bandwidth networks (ADSL and Cable being the most common).

In most parts of the western world "broadband" is rapidly replacing old fashioned dial-up connections (which were "low bandwidth" - or "slow").