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This is only tangentially related, but the dictionary isn't helping me distinguish between these two concepts. In networking what is the difference between band

This is only tangentially related, but the dictionary isn't helping me distinguish between these two concepts. In networking what is the difference between bandwidth and throughput, if there is a difference?

zbrozek 6y ago
Did you misread latency and throughput?
- Konohamaru 6y ago
  No. I went to look up throughput in the dictionary and couldn't understand how it was different from bandwidth.
wyldfire 6y ago
The other comment regarding latency/throughput is a good place to start because those can often be in contention. But bandwidth is not quite the same as throughput either, so I'll answer your question genuinely. Bandwidth typically refers to the actual channel capacity for a single link. Maybe that's your PCIe lane, your wifi channel or your HDRadio channel. The bandwidth is often measured as the spectral width of the channel in frequency. But those channels include some coding for error detection or compression. Ultimately what matters most is what kind of throughput the channel can deliver. This is the metric that is often measured in bytes or bits per second. A one gigabit Ethernet card is intended to deliver one gigabit/sec of throughput with the Ethernet channel coding. So if you hooked up a test device to your NIC it should be able to drive frames through an otherwise unoccupied channel at one gigabit/sec. But to keep the example interesting, end-users would generally measure throughput with all the added layers of coding and protocol provided by a network stack. The term "bandwidth" is much more nebulous when someone uses it to describe traffic spanning various buses and network media. I'd take context clues and assume that this usage of the term is somewhat like throughput. Though perhaps you could consider the independent physical channels as a single logical one and extrapolate some kind of conceptual bandwidth? Sorry, starting to ramble a bit at the end there but I think you may get the gist.

zbrozek 6y ago

Did you misread latency and throughput?

Konohamaru 6y ago
No. I went to look up throughput in the dictionary and couldn't understand how it was different from bandwidth.

wyldfire 6y ago

The other comment regarding latency/throughput is a good place to start because those can often be in contention. But bandwidth is not quite the same as throughput either, so I'll answer your question genuinely. Bandwidth typically refers to the actual channel capacity for a single link. Maybe that's your PCIe lane, your wifi channel or your HDRadio channel. The bandwidth is often measured as the spectral width of the channel in frequency. But those channels include some coding for error detection or compression. Ultimately what matters most is what kind of throughput the channel can deliver. This is the metric that is often measured in bytes or bits per second. A one gigabit Ethernet card is intended to deliver one gigabit/sec of throughput with the Ethernet channel coding. So if you hooked up a test device to your NIC it should be able to drive frames through an otherwise unoccupied channel at one gigabit/sec. But to keep the example interesting, end-users would generally measure throughput with all the added layers of coding and protocol provided by a network stack. The term "bandwidth" is much more nebulous when someone uses it to describe traffic spanning various buses and network media. I'd take context clues and assume that this usage of the term is somewhat like throughput. Though perhaps you could consider the independent physical channels as a single logical one and extrapolate some kind of conceptual bandwidth? Sorry, starting to ramble a bit at the end there but I think you may get the gist.