Bandwidth explained from software engineer point of view

Bandwidth is measured by how many bits a device is allowed to send/receive in a second. It ranges from your internal network starting from network card all the way to your ISP Internet speed. In this video we will discuss the definition of bandwidth upload vs download speed, the different usage patterns for normal web browsing, streaming, gaming, media production and cloud web servers etc and finally we will show an example of the whole thing.

When your ISP gives you 80Mbs download/1Mbs upload bandwidth, this means 80 mega bits download which means your router (and all your devices) can receive (download) a total of 80 mega bits in a second at a time, and it can send (upload) 1 mega bit in a second. With your ISP can you pick and choose your plan that fits your usage.

Usage patterns

Web Browsing

Most people download far more than they upload. So the download bandwidth matter more than upload bandwidth. For simple web browsing the download incoming traffic is slightly larger than the outgoing one. You make a GET request to pull index.html, you get back the html content. Yeah there are some images but still not much of incoming.

Streaming

Think about it when you watch a movie in Netflix you make a small request usually in few hundred bytes. But the data you receive (download) is huge. So streaming is constant large incoming data. While still outgoing traffic is minimum.

Gaming

The bandwidth for gamers is really interesting specially who play online and it really depends on the game. a game might use the server authoritative model, where all the online players send their inputs and receive the final game state changes from the server. In that case the there is a constant upload, still minor but the download bandwidth is larger since state is usually bigger. Games can also use the lock state model or the client authoritative model, where all the clients send their inputs the server and the server just send back all the input from all players back to everyone so everyone calculate the game state locally. So in this efficient model, both the upload and download is quite small and its good for countries with low bandwidth.

Some games require cloud saving which means upload speed is recommended.

In general latency is much better in gaming.

Media production

Youtuber and you make 5 videos a day so you need to upload alot of data to the youtube server. So upload speed really matter, and download also matter because you will also consume alot.

Web servers

Netflix (which is hosted in amazon) they upload data far more than they download. So their upload bandwidth is more than their download bandwidth. All those movies and tv shows pushed to consumers.

Example

Assume you have bandwidth of 80mb/s download speed (which is 10 Mega bytes per second) and 1mb/s upload (which is 125 KB per second). You are connected to a web server which has 80Gb/s upload and 80Gb/s download bandwidth, which is 10Gigabyte per second. Lets say you want to download a 60GB file or movie (no streaming). It will take the server 6 seconds to upload that file however it will take you 1.7 hours to download it. Your ISP That is not entirely true though for TCP, which implement congestion control. UDP does not implement congestion control.

Episode 97 - Bandwidth

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser