What is Bandwidth?

  What is Bandwidth?

You probably already have a fairly good idea on what bandwidth is. It is technically defined as the amount of information that can flow through a network at a given period of time. This is, however, theoretical- the actual bandwidth available to a certain device on the network is actually referred to as throughput (which we’ll discuss further on in this section).

Bandwidth can be compared to a highway in many respects. A highway can only allow for a certain amount of vehicles before traffic becomes congested. Likewise, we refer to bandwidth as finite- it has a limit to its capability. If we accommodate the highway with multiple lanes, more traffic could get through. This also applies to networks- we could perhaps upgrade a 56K modem to a DSL modem and get much higher transfer speeds.
Bandwidth is measured in bits per second (bps). This basic unit of measurement is fairly small, however, and you’ll more than likely see bandwidth expressed as kilobits, megabits, and gigabits.

Unit Of Bandwidth

Make sure you make the distinction between bits and bytes. A megabyte is certainly not the same as a megabit, although they are abbreviated quite similarly. Since we know there are 8 bits in a byte, you can simply divide the number of bits by 8 to find the byte equivalent (or to convert from bytes to bits, multiply by 8).

Megabit megabyte

Lastly, it’s important to also make the distinction between speed and bandwidth. Bandwidth is simply how many bits we can transmit a second, not the speed at which they travel. We can use the water pipe analogy to grasp this concept further. More water could be transported by buying a larger pipe- but the speed at which the water flows is less affected.