What’s the difference between Bandwidth, Data Transfer Rate, Latency, and Throughput and what’s their job for internet speed?
In: Technology
Kind of wonky from a technical perspective, but hey, it’s for a five year old:
Bandwidth: how fast can data go through your connection? This is measured in “amount of data per second”
Transfer rate: how fast is data currently going? (Also “data per second”)
Latency: how long do you have to wait for some data to start arriving? (Measured in “milliseconds”)
Throughput: I would say ist is the same as transfer rate, but I may be wrong.
Depending on what you try to do with your Internet, you need different properties. Do you want to download a game? You need a high transfer rate. Even if the download takes 2 seconds to start (that would be a horrible latency), if it reaches a high data rate then it will be finished soon.
Do you want to do voice chat? Voice does not need high data rates, but a fast latency. If everything anyone days would take 2 seconds until the other person a hear it, you would constantly talk over each other (I think it starts to get annoying if the latency is slower than 100ms for voice chat).
Do you want to surf reddit? You need a bit of both.
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