The ISP s, cable and telecommunications markets are both battling it out to see who can pump the most bandwidth into the homes of the 21 st century. Along with this bitter competition comes the falsehoods and exaggerations by both of what their technology can do. By understanding the meanings and functions of the different terms used you will be able to make an educated guess as to what your business needs. I have arranged them in an order I think will be easier to comprehend. The amount of data that can be transported on a medium.
Lets use an example where water is the data and a pipe is the transport method.
When drinking through a straw you can only suck in a small amount of water, you will eventually get the glass empty but it would take much longer if say that same glass was poured down a sink pipe. Bandwidth is the same way, you can just as simply download a 2Megabyte file at home on your dial-up account but this would take far less time if you had a cable modem or ISDN line. You may have heard this term when shopping for modems when comparing 28.8Kbps and 56Kbps. This simply means that it can carry 28,000 bits per second or 56,000 bits per second. This is the translator between your computer and your phone line to dial-up to the Internet.