In this video, I provide an analogy to explain what bandwidth is, and how it affects your home network. I also detail a common misconception about bandwidth.

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0:00 Introduction
0:49 Analogy for bandwidth and how it works
5:16 How the analogy relates to bandwidth
9:32 A common misconception about bandwidth
11:17 Summary and conclusion

What is bandwidth and how does it affect your network?
You will often see bandwidth marketed as “internet speed”, but I like to think of it differently.

Rather than being a measure of how fast your devices your devices can access the internet, it is more a measure of the total amount of data that is available to you at a given point in time.

For example, your internet plan details a maximum possible bandwidth that you will get in your home network. This bandwidth is provided in Megabits per second (Mbps). In other words, at any given time in your home network, you should be able to download that amount of data from the internet without any problems.

So in a case where you have a 100 Mbps internet plan, as long as the total demand of all your devices accessing the internet is not greater than 100 Mbps, they shouldn’t have any performance issues.

In a situation where you have 4 devices that each require 25 Mbps, you’ll have no problems.

On the other hand, if you have 5 devices that each require 25 Mbps, you’ll experience slow internet performance on at least one of the devices.

The other important thing to keep in mind is that having excess bandwidth at any given time doesn’t make your devices faster. For example, if you have a 100 Mbps internet plan and you only have 1 device accessing the internet and it requires 25 Mbps, the other 75 Mbps of bandwidth from your internet plan is not being used. It’s essentially wasted because the spare bandwidth isn’t used by your device accessing the internet.

This is why marketing for “super fast” internet plans can be misleading. Buying a 600 Mbps internet plan is a waste of money if you only have a few devices accessing the internet at a given time.

Conclusion
If you have any questions about what bandwidth is and how it affects your home network, please leave a comment below.