Thursday, August 16, 2012

Lesson 9 - ICND1(1.6c)Describe the impact of applications such as Voice Over IP on a network

In networking, bandwidth is the amount of data (expressed in bits per second) that can be transmitted within a certain unit of time (i.e. 1000Mbps, 100Mbps, 10Mbps, 28.8Kbps over a physical medium.  

Note: Bandwidth is often confused with throughput.  Throughput is the measurement of of actual network traffic traversing a network. So think of bandwidth as the potential of a connection, and throughput as the reality.  This is often confused by retail internet customers, who buy a 6Mbps DSL link, and complain when they download a file at 100Kbps.  While their bandwidth to the service provider is 6Mbps, the throughput to the destination file server (from end to end over the Internet) is only 100Kbps.

The below graphic is a general idea of bandwidth requirements.  Requirements can vary depending on the application used.


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