Put simply, bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The amount of bandwidth a hosting company can provide is determined by their network connections, both internal to their data centre and external to the public internet.
A very simple analogy to use to understand bandwidth and traffic is to think of highways and cars. Bandwidth is the number of lanes on the highway and traffic is the number of cars on the highway. If you are the only car on a highway, you can travel very quickly. If you are stuck in the middle of rush hour, you may travel very slowly since all of the lanes are being used up.
The internet, in the most simplest of terms, is a group of millions of computers connected by networks. Bandwidth basically allows the internet to operate. What does this mean? Well without bandwidth we wouldn’t be able to load the data that appears on a website. It allows IP packets to travels along different routes to reach the final destination/ server. Fundamentally the number routes in the network are the amount of bandwidth that is currently in place.
Bandwidth is commonly used for measuring the data transfer over routes to a particular destination/server
At the moment on Telstra we get 30megabits/sec on cable internet whereas on the national broadband network we could get 1000megabits/sec.
