Bandwidth

How it is used

Used in capacity planning, sales and complaints alike. People buy, upgrade, use up and run out of bandwidth; a link may be short of bandwidth during backups. Bandwidth is the capacity of the pipe; throughput is how much data actually gets through.

Example sentences

1. Video calls are using most of the bandwidth on the branch link.

2. We upgraded the internet line from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps because we kept running out of bandwidth.

Common collocations

• increase bandwidth
• bandwidth usage
• high bandwidth
• run out of bandwidth
• bandwidth upgrade

Related terms

• throughputThe amount of data that actually gets through a connection in a given time, which is usually lower than the bandwidth because of overhead, errors and congestion.
• latencyThe time it takes for data to travel from one point of a network to another, usually measured in milliseconds; lower latency means a faster response.
• congestionA situation in which more traffic is trying to cross a link or device than it can handle, so packets are queued or dropped and everything slows down.
• bottleneckThe point in a network or system where capacity is lowest, so it limits the speed of everything that passes through it, like the narrow neck of a bottle.
• QoSShort for quality of service: a set of techniques that give important traffic, such as voice and video, priority over less urgent traffic when a link is busy.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• bandwidth · Software Engineering
• bandwidth · Electrical & Electronics Engineering
• bandwidth · Business English

More terms: Bandwidth, Latency and Reliability

• packet loss
• jitter
• round-trip time
• redundancy
• failover