Tired of Buffering? Know the Difference Between Latency and Bandwidth
Our Internet capabilities have grown tremendously over the past two decades. Most of that progress is thanks to improvements in the Internet itself. As recently as 2000, the idea of three people in a home watching three different movies on three different devices was inconceivable. Today, if we can’t do that, we figure something’s wrong somewhere. We start asking questions about latency and bandwidth – but what do those terms actually mean?
If you need to call a tech support person because you have Internet issues, being able to explain exactly what’s happening will be helpful. So, let’s break down those two concepts, latency and bandwidth, so you can explain what’s going wrong.
What is Bandwidth
We can think of bandwidth like the flow of water through a water pipe. We measure that flow in gallons per minute. It’s important to understand that bandwidth isn’t the equipment, the data, or even the size of the pipe—it’s the rate of flow. We measure bandwidth in megabits per second (Mbps) or gigabits per second (Gbps). That’s very different from megabytes and gigabytes, which would be MBps and GBps, but that’s a topic for another day.
What is Latency
Latency is often vilified as the cause of slow Internet responses. However, let’s get clear on the definition of latency. Latency is the time it takes for data to travel from its source to its destination, and for the destination device to send a response back to the original device. Latency itself is neither good nor bad – it’s just a measure of time. There are a lot of factors that contribute to latency, but high latency means a longer out-and-back time, and low latency is a shorter out-and-back time.
Why They Both Matter
Everyone knows they want high bandwidth. But what happens if you have that fantastic high bandwidth and have high latency? Well, you get nice, fast downloads, but your video calls will be laggy. If you have low latency but low bandwidth, you’ll have responsive communication, but poor video or audio quality.
You can think of data flow like cars on a highway. As long as the road is good and there’s nothing to change the flow, the traffic can move at a consistent rate. An accident in one of the lanes can affect the flow by forcing all traffic into the remaining open lanes, or it can halt traffic entirely. A toll booth forces all the traffic to slow or stop, and it may funnel all the traffic into fewer lanes. And sometimes there are just too many cars on the road to allow a smooth traffic flow.
What Else Might Matter?
There are things that affect your data flow as well. You can have too many devices on your network trying to use your network resources, and that will slow your traffic to all devices. Your data may have to travel a long way to its destination, and that just takes longer. If that receiving device is extremely busy, your data may have to wait for its turn for the device’s attention. Some of the pieces of data can get lost or damaged in transit and have to be resent. There’s a process to check for that that’s way too advanced for this post, but the device knows which bit of data to expect next, and if it gets something different, it sends a “hey, you skipped something” message to the sending device.
Those are the organic conditions that can increase latency. Besides all of that, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may put a cap on speed or priority during certain times (“throttling”). Also, as equipment ages, it just can’t keep up with the increase in traffic and expectations. Even if it’s all working as perfectly as it was designed, 20-year-old equipment was never going to be able to keep up with today’s demands.
Quick Tips to Improve Both Bandwidth and Latency
It may seem like you can’t do much to affect latency, but latency is measured from source device to destination device, not just from the point it leaves your home network. That means that the problem could be somewhere between your tablet and the gateway to the Internet inside your house. Here’s a short list of things to try if you’re consistently seeing laggy video or slow web page loads.
- Restart router
- Use a wired connection to the router if possible
- Place the router centrally if possible
- Turn off unused devices
- Ask your provider for speed and latency test results
If none of these steps help, it may be time to look at upgrading your Internet plan or replacing some old equipment. I know, nobody wants to hear that, but sometimes we just outgrow what worked fine five years ago.
Your Turn
Now you know the difference between bandwidth and latency. You’ll be able to describe the problem better to Tech Support and get the right help faster.
What’s been your biggest Internet frustration—slow downloads, buffering videos, dropped calls, or something else? Share your story in the comments—let’s see how common these issues really are!
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