Now imagine you have a 5Mbps (bandwidth) connection or 5 lanes on the motorway… how long will it take then? Well, it would be 1 second. It’s going to take you 5 seconds to download. And let’s say you are trying to download an image that’s 5 Mb in size. For example, if Mbps is the equivalent of a 1 lane of the motorway.

To get more cars down that motorway you need to make the motorway wider. All cars (data) are driving down one lane of the motorway at the same speed.

Think about Bandwidth in terms of a motorway. Understanding Bandwidth and Internet Speeds You can read more about Latency here! OK back to Bandwidth. Latency is how long it takes data to travel between its source and destination, measured in milliseconds.

Bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred per second. Bandwidth: Bandwidth determines how fast data can be transferred over time.Internet connections, including satellite Internet connections, are advertised with speeds like “up to 15 Mbps.” You may look at a satellite Internet connection offering this speed and assume the experience of using it would be comparable to the experience of using a 15 Mbps cable Internet connection, but you would be wrong. In fact, real “internet speed” has to do with something called latency. Internet speed, the number they give you (5 Mbps, for example), has nothing to do with how fast your internet works. It’s easy to get confused when we think about Internet Speeds and Bandwidth.

Test speed bandwidth