Cable Forum - View Single Post

BBKing · 22-09-2003, 20:19

Not really the speed of light.

The road analogy is one I like. Bandwidth is the width, the number of vehicles you can get down the road at a time. Latency is the speed limit, how fast you can go at down the road. Dial up is therefore a narrow, winding farm track, you can't drive fast and you can't get more than one car down. A 600k BB connection might be a 2 lane dual carriageway, 70mph limit, you can get a lot more cars on it at once.

Stuttering video - you could be on 150k by mistake (it happens) or have bad packet loss, or congestion on the UBR could be reducing bandwidth. And those are just ones ntl could be involved with, you're then talking BBC problems, net problems en route.

I'm beginning to wonder what the advantages of streaming video would be in a world of wide data links and huge storage. Eventually it'll take such a short time to download video and store it locally that some of the advantages of streaming would be lost, and it might only be of use for live events.

22-09-2003, 20:19	#5
BBKing R.I.P. Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: London Services: 20Mb VM CM, Virgin TV Posts: 5,983	Not really the speed of light. The road analogy is one I like. Bandwidth is the width, the number of vehicles you can get down the road at a time. Latency is the speed limit, how fast you can go at down the road. Dial up is therefore a narrow, winding farm track, you can't drive fast and you can't get more than one car down. A 600k BB connection might be a 2 lane dual carriageway, 70mph limit, you can get a lot more cars on it at once. Stuttering video - you could be on 150k by mistake (it happens) or have bad packet loss, or congestion on the UBR could be reducing bandwidth. And those are just ones ntl could be involved with, you're then talking BBC problems, net problems en route. I'm beginning to wonder what the advantages of streaming video would be in a world of wide data links and huge storage. Eventually it'll take such a short time to download video and store it locally that some of the advantages of streaming would be lost, and it might only be of use for live events.