QandAs: Tech

What is Bandwidth?

Answer:
Bandwidth refers to the amount of information

able to travel through a network or modem connection at any given time. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits per second, bps, for digital devises such as computer networks, but can also be measured in bytes.

For analog services such as radio wave transmissions, bandwidth is measured in Hertz. Bandwidth, in computer networks, generally represents the capacity of the connection, the greater the capacity the better or faster the information can be transferred from one point to another. As information is being transferred, it usually moves through a path with many different links, each of these links having its own bandwidth. If one link has a much smaller bandwidth than the others it is called a bandwidth bottleneck.

Your ability to download an image or video from the Internet is limited by bandwidth. The speed to which it is downloaded is dependent upon the bandwidth pushing from the server hosting the image or video as well as the bandwidth from your computer pulling the image or video from the server. The faster the better, often times ISP's will provide asyncrhonous bandwidth. Asynchronous bandwidth usually consists of faster download speeds than upload speeds. Upload speeds are important for those of you pushing data over the Internet.