Why is latency and bandwith separated? If latency is delay of data, and bandwith is data over time, shouldn’t one affect another? If it takes 5s for a car to start, and 10s to reach it’s destination, then the average speed would be spread out across the whole 15s. Should this not be the same?
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Lets look at two extremes here. Morse code flashed with lights vs IPoAC
If you’ve got two ships near each other you can send a message by flashing morse code via lights. The time it takes for each flash to reach the other ship is extraordinarily short, nanoseconds or microseconds at most, but because you have to manually flash the light on and off your bandwidth is quite low so it can take minutes to send a sentence. This is ultra low latency but also ultra low bandwidth.
The other end of the spectrum is IPoAC or Internet Protocol over Avian Carrier(my favorite implementation of IP). It involves loading all your data onto an SD card, strapping it to the leg of a carrier pigeon and sending it on its way. It’ll take hours or even days for your data to arrive, but you can send a terabyte this way pretty easily(but send it twice because predators=packet loss). This is ultra high latency and ultra high bandwidth.
If you’re sending a short message then you can do it wayyyy faster by blinking the lights, but if you’re sending a long message then the low bandwidth of the blinking lights would let you catch up using the carrier pigeon even though it needs a couple hours.
To take your car analogy, it takes 5 seconds for a car to start and 10 seconds to reach its destination is fine for sending a single car to the destination. But what if i want to move a bunch? Well then i can spend 10 seconds starting the truck that’ll take 20 seconds to get to the destination but carry 8 cars there, that’s a much faster way to move cars from A to B even though the Latency is a lot higher, but if you’re only moving a single car it’ll be slower
The connection you want depends on your needs.
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