The difference between latency and speed of an internet service provided by ISPs?
In: Technology
Latency is the actual physical delay. If you live in US and you want to grab some stuff from Europe, you need to cross an entire ocean.
Bandwidth (speed) is how much data you can send or receive. Faster speeds, faster you can get/give stuff.
Speed is how much data you can get per second.
Latency is how long it takes that data to get to you.
A van full of external hard drives that drives the data across the city to you is an extremely high bandwidth connection – say it has 100 TB worth of drives in it, and takes an hour to get to you. That averages out to 222Gb/s! That’s fantastic compared to most connections. Except for you’re waiting an hour every time you try to load a new webpage.
Latency matters most for gaming and live video or meetings, where you can’t just build up a buffer of data. For things like streaming movies, players buffer some data so that even if it takes time for more to come in, you don’t notice because it keeps smoothly playing the data it already has.
Speed=throughput=data/second
Latency is travel time.
A truck packed full of 16TB SSDs has stupid high data transfer per second on average. The multi day road trip across the continent makes it infeasible for playing shooter games online though.
Yes, there is an xkcd. You should break the mold and google AWS Snowmobile instead of posting the comic this time.
I can send a single piece of data to the house next door in 2ms, to the next town over in 4ms, and all the way across the country and back in 56ms.
The amount of time it takes for a “packet” to travel somewhere and back is called the latency.
If I download a really big file from my buddy with a cheap internet connection, it takes *ages*. If I download the same file from a big service on the internet it takes seconds, even though that service is in, say, Australia.
The amount of data that you can send every second is called bandwidth.
Between my house and my buddy next door there’s low latency (good) but also low bandwidth (bad).
Between my house and the server in Australia there’s high latency (bad) but also high bandwidth (good!)
Low latency is good for reducing lag in games – you’re sending little bits of data back and forth really fast (my character moved here, shot there, etc).
High bandwidth is good for watching movies – you’re receiving LOTS of data per second, but if it takes a couple bit before it starts playing that’s fine.
Bandwidth (speed) is how wide the road is that is giving you data. With a 1 lane road you can only get one truck full of data at a time, but with a 8 lane road you could get 8 trucks of data at once.
Latency is how long it takes for the truck to get to you from when it is dispatched, basically how fast it is driving.
If you are playing a video game, it doesn’t take much data actually, so the 1 lane road might be fine. But it is important that the data gets to you quick. Otherwise there is a delay between when you click a button and your character shoots or jumps. So you want that truck to be more like a Ferrari than a Kenworth.
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