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| The good about low bandwidth is that you will find times to read newspaper |
Bandwidth, in a dumbed-down version, is the volume of information or data that a transmission medium can handle per unit of time; the transmission medium usually is internet, but bandwidth is also a widely used concept in radio broadcasting, signal processing, and other forms of digital communication. Both wireless and physical communication networks use bandwidth as the unit to measure capacity to transmit, transfer, and receive data.
When you turn on
your computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone, smartwatch, smart TV, smart
refrigerator, smart thermostat, smart weather monitoring system, or basically
any device you have with a prefix “smart”
that requires internet connection, it does not mean that the device suddenly
makes you a smart person but it does transmit and receive data. In between
those activities, the data must travel through a medium called Internet which
may consists of multiple networks. Your device needs to receive information
from a source so it can show some interesting images on the screen, and it must
also send data so the Internet understands your request, search term, or the website
address that you want to access.
Internet is not
one big computer with trillions of terabytes of data. For example if you open a
Wikipedia page, you access information from Wikipedia server; watching cat videos
on YouTube also means the data is sent from the company’s server, not the cat. The
data you receive is sent from a specific server located somewhere is somebody’s
garage; you may also want to check your neighbor’s basement. In such case, your
modem is the receiving end. During peer-to-peer connection or if you upload
images of your latest piece of this morning’s scrambled eggs to Facebook, your
modem is the source.
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| An image says a thousand words, plus some asterisks |
Your bandwidth
is often measured in bits per second (bps); “bits” represent the volume of
information, while “second” is the unit of time. Internet connection with
smaller bandwidth is more likely slower than one with larger bandwidth. If the
source side has a bandwidth of 512 Kbps and the receiving party only has 128
Kbps, there will be a delay in communication due to different maximum transfer
rate. However, this is not the only way to determine speed since you also have
to consider noise, especially when you are using wireless Internet. Noises or
interferences can come from almost anything including microwave, electric
motors, radio, atmosphere, Thor, and aliens. If you have a gigabyte of
bandwidth but the loading circle keeps on turning, try to add some more stuffs to
your offerings to Thor, preferably a perfume or a more appropriate rain coat.
For more accurate diagnostic result, you also need to run a bandwidth test.
Your ISP gives
you very specific number to tell you how fast your Internet is. Assuming you
have a 100 Mbps bandwidth, it means your modem or router can handle a data
transfer rate of 100 million bits every second. If you read the previous two
sentences carefully just like you very rarely do, it says Mbps instead of MBps
– there is a big difference between the two. Referring back to the previous
discussion, bandwidth is volume of information transmitted per unit of time but
no law that says it must be in bits per second. Any unit of volume and time can
be used such as bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, second,
minute, hour, day, and so on. A bandwidth speed test will tell you exactly how
slow the connection is.
One byte equals
to 8 bits, so 100 Mbps is roughly just around 12.5 MBps. Don’t blame your ISP
for using the larger number because it actually is your fault for not being
very good at reading. How much bandwidth you need depends only on how you plan
to use it and the money you have. For simple Facebook stalking or trolling, a
low-end bandwidth should be sufficient. On the other hand, you need to spend
all the money you can spend on bandwidth and computers if you want to hack the
Pentagon.