Latency versus Bandwidth – What is it?
One of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in networking is speed and capacity. Most people believe that capacity and speed are the same thing. For example, it’s common to hear “How fast is your connection?” Invariably, the answer will be “640K”, “1.5M” or something similar. These answers are actually referring to the bandwidth or capacity of the service, not speed. Speed and bandwidth are interdependent. The combination of latency and bandwidth gives users the perception of how quickly a webpage loads or a file is transferred. It doesn’t help that broadband providers keep saying “get high speed access” when they probably should be saying “get high capacity access”. Notice the term “Broadband” – it refers to how wide the pipe is, not how fast. Latency: Latency is delay. For our purposes, it is the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from source to destination. Together, latency and bandwidth define the speed and capacity of a network. Latency is normally expressed in millis
