What is bandwidth and how does it affect your connections?

What is bandwidth and how it affects connection speed?

What is bandwidth? Over the last few years, and at the dawn of the very celebrated arrival of the Internet into our homes and our beloved cell phones, concepts such as bandwidth, previously restricted to more technical contexts, have come into our lives hand in hand with waves of experts who recommend this or that connection based on criteria that usually fits your brother-in-law’s wisdom.

However, although you may hear a lot about bandwidth and you may have more or less an idea of what it is, it is convenient to know better what we are talking about. So, what is bandwidth? In this post we are going to delve a little into the wonderful world of bandwidth, to discover what it is and understand how having higher or lower bandwidth affects your connection.

What is bandwidth?

If we talk about computing (because the term is also used in other areas of expertise), we know as bandwidth the amount of information (data) that can be sent through a network connection in a certain period of time.

Since it is a measure related to time, bandwidth is usually measured in units of information per second. Depending on the amount of information we are able to send, we will talk about bytes per second (BPS), kilobytes per second (KBPS), megabytes per second (MBPS), etc.

However, there is also another computing meaning of the term that, although it is used less frequently, it is also worth knowing, such as the one that refers to the amount of data transfer (usually measured monthly) that companies offering web hosting services allow their users.

How does all this affect us?

As an attentive and smart reader of Pandora FMS blog, you’re probably getting an idea of what the powerful consequences that higher or lesser bandwidth unleashes on our lives are. Indeed, the ones we are most concerned about have to do with connection speed.

In fact, in this dynamic world we live in, speed is key. And so is data! We want lots of data at the fastest possible speed. How else, otherwise, could we do things like watch dancing parrot videos with no interruption or send our friends pictures of our last breakfast in Super HD quality?

Therefore, if in some situations bandwidth is not adequate to our needs, some symptoms such as the desire to throw the computer out of the window may appear, which is still worrying.

Some reasons why bandwidth might be affecting the connection speed

-Your Internet service provider is not giving you what you need

Did you just hire the best hyper-fast connection on the market, and your angry baby videos are still lagging? You should contact your provider, because there may be some technical issues or they’re not supplying you with the bandwidth you’ve hired and you need.

By the way, we already published a great article about all this, by our colleague Carla Andrés, where we talked about bandwidth monitoring.

However, it may also just be that your connection, which was super-fast before, no longer is. It may have become outdated and you may need to sign up for one that provides you with higher bandwidth to satisfy your data cravings at high speed.

-Someone may be using your Wi-Fi connection without authorization

Remember that neighbor who looks at you in the morning with a knowingly smile? Haven’t you noticed that, since he does, your Internet connection is much slower? Is it possible that he’s using your Wi-Fi connection?

Okay, don’t take this as a white card to suspect all your neighbors – not even those who look at you with a smart face – but you should know that one of the reasons you might be losing speed on your connections is the fact that you’re sharing bandwidth with some unauthorized person.

Wi-Fi connections are usually private and protected by a password, so maybe you should check yours. You could find out that your WiFi is public or poorly protected by a very simple password.

-You’re abusing your connection bandwidth

It’s something that could happen too. Your connection bandwidth may be great, but if you invite a battalion of friends home to connect to the Internet, the speed may suffer. As the name suggests, “width” means something, and if the information demanding to drive through that bandwidth is too large, it will have to wait…

Although the previous reasons (in addition to some others) may be causing a speed drop of your bandwidth-related connection, you should know that there are also other factors that may be affecting it. For example, latency may be too high, or you may have problems with your router. This is not about doing an exhaustive enumeration, but it is also something that you should keep in mind if you have this type of issue.

And now that we have seen “what is bandwidth?”, why don’t you take a few minutes to learn about Pandora FMS?

As you can see, if you read the article we mentioned before, one of the things Pandora FMS can monitor is bandwidth, but Pandora FMS can also monitor many other different things!

Because Pandora FMS is a flexible monitoring software, capable of monitoring devices, infrastructures, applications, services and business processes.

Would you like to find out more about what Pandora FMS can offer you? Click here.

If you have to monitor more than 100 devices, you can also enjoy a FREE 30-day Pandora FMS Enterprise TRIAL . Get it here .