Marketing Terms

Bandwidth

Definition

How much data can be transmitted in a time period over a communications channel, often expressed in kilobits per second (kbps).

Information

The difference between bandwidth and data transfer causes much confusion and is worth noting.

Bandwidth is a rate and data transfer is a total. For example, you might be a web hosting plan with 128 kbps of bandwidth for a maximum monthly data transfer of roughly 40 GB.

128 kbps= bits= bytes
per second128,00016,000
per minute7,680,000960,000
per hour460,800,00057,600,000
per day11,059,200,0001,382,400,000
per month331,776,000,00041,472,000,000
  divide by one billion
~41 gigabytes/month

Note: many hosts use the terms bandwidth and data transfer interchangeably, referring to the monthly data allowance as bandwidth.

Articles

WebHosting Bandwidth – An Introduction
SitePoint.com (May 14, 2001)

Related Terms

view all terms in the Web Hosting glossary or all terms in the Digital Marketing glossary