What Is Bandwidth in Networking?
If you are interested in data centers or colocation, there are many terms that are worth understanding. Understanding these terms can make your organization better understand what it is getting into and how you can measure success going forward. One of the most common and important terms to understand is bandwidth. If your business wishes to have a successful bout with data centers and colocation services, you will need to understand what is bandwidth in networking? Our data backup and recovery experts explore this topic in the following article. Continue reading to learn more from an experienced server outsourcing and Philadelphia cloud hosting organization.
What Is Internet Bandwidth?
Put simply, internet bandwidth is a measurement that indicates the maximum capacity that the internet and communications have within any given time. The more bandwidth that a connection has, the more data it can send and receive at one time. A good way to view bandwidth is by envisioning a pipe that has water flowing through it. The wider the pipe, the more water can flow through. When it comes to bandwidth, data can stream much faster through the network with more bandwidth. Typically, the cost of a network connection increases as the bandwidth increases.
While they are often conflated, bandwidth and speed are not the same things. Our Charlotte data center would like to point out the difference between these two terms. Speed refers to the rate at which data travels, while bandwidth refers to the capacity that something has to deliver that speed. In other words, you will need a larger bandwidth in order to experience fast speed. One of them is not possible without the other.
What Does Increasing Bandwidth Do?
Bandwidth is important for businesses to have in mind because it is not an unlimited resource. Different locations will have a different amount of bandwidth capacity to play with. For example, a home and office building will have different limitations. This could be due to the type of router or modem they have installed or the type of cabling they have inside the home. Also, many devices will have to share the same bandwidth. Different devices or appliances that you have in your home or business will use different kinds of bandwidth. For example, if your office has 4K TVs, these will use more bandwidth than many other devices.
Increasing the amount of bandwidth that you have will make it easier for your home or office to use different appliances and tools that are essential to it. For example, an office that has recently upgraded the number of employees they have will need to upgrade its bandwidth to ensure that its appliances and computers are working at peak performance.
How to Measure Bandwidth Capacity
To measure bandwidth capacity, you will need to understand the most common units of measurement. Our New Jersey data centers would like to mention that the original unit of measurement was expressed in bits per second (BPS). Because speeds have increased exponentially, BPS has become outdated as technology has advanced. Now, the most common bandwidth units are megabits per second (MPBS) or gigabits per second (GBPS). These units of measurement can give enough leeway to account for the higher speeds that are commonly achievable thanks to modern technology. The more complex the needs of your business are, the more bandwidth you will need to achieve maximum efficiency.
More About LightWave Networks
What is bandwidth in networking? We hope that our experienced Dallas data center professionals have answered your question. We are a data center and colocation hosting business that is dedicated to making sure that our clients in the business sector can leverage some of the most important and beneficial data center and colocation technologies available in the modern business world. Our full suite of services includes the following:
- Colocation
- Dedicated servers
- Cloud servers
- Raspberry Pi colocation
- Blended BGP IP transit
- Managed networking
- Remote backup
- And more
Contact us today to learn more from our experts and our New Jersey, Dallas, or Charlotte data centers. We also offer a wide collection of different useful resources for people that are interested in learning more about this industry thanks to our IT and colocation blog.