Page 238 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

UNDERSTANDING BANDWIDTH
It definitely takes some time to get your mind wrapped around bandwidth. What exactly is bandwidth anyway? Trying to understand bandwidth can be like trying to understand warp speed in Star Trek. Nobody really understood what it was, but we knew that it made the Enterprise ship go very fast. Punch it, Scotty! Because bandwidth is such a fuzzy topic, it is best to use an analogy in order to understand it.
In a nutshell, bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass over a network at any given time. The best analogy for this is water moving through a hose or pipe. You can think of your data as a pool full of water. If you have a lot of data, such as those massive PDF documents, or 300-page PowerPoint presentations, then you have a lot of water. Say the amount of an Olympic-size swimming pool. If you have just a little, such as a two- page Notepad document, then you just have a small cereal bowl-size of water.
Now, to get that water from Point A to Point B, you need to pipe it through plumbing. If you have a massive 3-foot diameter pipe, then your water will move very quickly. If you have a garden hose, your water will move very slowly. This concept is illustrated in the following figure.
The rate at which you can move water through the plumbing and data through the net- work is called bandwidth. The 3-foot diameter pipe provides high bandwidth and the garden hose provides a small amount of bandwidth. The trick with bandwidth is to remember that the least common denominator always wins. For example, in the water analogy, you might be moving that swimming pool full of water across town, but if the pump siphoning the water out of the pool is only a small hose that attaches to a 3-foot diameter pipe, then guess what — the water will only move as fast as the small hose can move it. The 3-foot pipe will just trickle the water along as it comes out of the small hose. On the other hand, if you have a 3-foot pump to go along with that 3-foot hose, then the water will fly through the pipe at a rapid rate.
It is the same with data over the network. If you have a very slow wireless router in your house, then it doesn’t matter how fast the Internet speed is coming in and out of your house.
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