The bandwidth is often high and latency low on such buses. However, the architecture is inflexible. The basic SCSI bus with just one host computer is an example of such a channel environment. In the network world, the picture is quite different. Here the environment is unstructured, open and behaves much more unpredictably.
All devices can talk to any other device at any time.
One consequence of this is that more control is needed to correctly handle connections, access permissions, route information and other aspects of correct behavior. The result is that channels are often characterized by high throughput and low overhead, while networks tend to have low throughput and high overhead. However, networks are much more flexible, more scalable and run for longer distances than channels. Some of the goals of the Fibre Channels standard are to provide support for existing protocols, flexible topologies, high bandwidth and long distances. One of the features of Fibre Channel is the use of existing, well-established protocols for data transmission.