Bandwidth, latency and throughput

Bandwidth, latency and throughput are terms used e.g. in networking. To understand their difference imagine a river. If you put some driftwood into it, it moves. The time needed for the wood to come from point A to B can be compared with latency. The river's width can be compared with the bandwidth and the amount of water it carries (liters per second or whatever) is analog to throughput. So we see: The higher the throughput and the lower the latency, the better. The computing terms are analog however bandwidth and throughput are often used synonymously.

See also

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_(engineering)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throughput
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_latency_and_throughput