Bandwidth vs Latency?

Question

Is bandwidth just measuring your connection speed to the ISP while latency is measuring the time from end to end? The reason I ask, they should be the same otherwise. 10Mbps has an amount per time. 10Mb every second. That seems to be the latency. It will take 2 seconds to get to the second Mb.

Answer 1

Latency is ping, just a call and response from another server somewhere. The number is the amount of time it took for that message to travel and get sent back, measured in milliseconds



Bandwidth is how much information can be crammed down the pipeline at the same time. You can have enormous bandwidth, but it still takes all that data a few milliseconds to travel to and from places.



In first person shooter games like counter strike, your latency or ping is much more important than your bandwidth. You can get an edge on multiplayer gameplay by having a faster response time, whereas for bandwidth it doesn't matter if you can transfer at 20Mbps or 1Gbps, because the game won't use it all anyway.

Answer 2

Latency is delayment of packets, bandwidth is an amount of packets per second.

Answer 3

Bandwidth when talking about network speed is the maximum amount of data that can be transferred at any given time per second, effectively your maximum speed.



Latency is the amount of time it takes for a packet of data to reach its destination. They are not the same thing. You can have great data transfer rates but terrible latency such as is the case with satellite internet services, because at that point you're bound by the speed of light sending the data up to the satellite and then shooting it back down to earth where your destination is.



My maximum download rate is around 150Mbps. Connecting to a server in my local city takes less than 50 milliseconds. If I tried to connect to a server located in Australia, that might shoot up to 150ms or higher. For file sharing or something, this doesn't really mean much. It does make a big difference in things like gaming where commands are sent back and forth very rapidly, so adding extra time before those commands are executed results in "lag" as many gamers complain about.



Low bandwidth can cause higher latency if your network is congested. If your bandwidth is not being taken up by, say, someone streaming 4K Netflix in two rooms or something, then at that point the only thing that really affects latency is distance.

Answer 4

You can have high bandwidth and still have high latency. Latency is the response time os one network device to another, and is not directly affected by bandwidth (speeds). If a server is busy, you can have almost the same latency with 10Mbps or 100Mbps links.

Latency is usually measured in ms (milliseconds). Latency can affect overall network performance when transfers or apps need every packet "confirmed" before sending the next packet of data. Latency is especially bad for wifi connections, due to many factors like retries, interference, etc. None of those are related to bandwidth. Bandwidth is the maximum data rate that can be put on that link, not how fast the network responds.

An example is a satellite link. You can have gigabits of bandwidth, but latency can be in the hundreds of milliseconds due to the distance to the satellite in space. To send a network packet and get a response between the two network nodes can take a very long time.