One might ask "what is bandwidth, and what does it mean to me?" Here's a simple explanation, which might be helpful in understanding bandwidth.
For a computer, bandwidth consists of zero's and ones (0 & 1), how many are available to your computer, and how many can your computer "grab" at one time. At our house, Cox Cable provides a certain amount of bandwidth that is available for their customers to use. It's a finite amount, and if my computer is the only one in my area that's online, I have available many bits (zeros and ones) that I can download. If, say, there are one hundred computers online sucking up bandwidth, then the amount available to my computer has been reduced. That's why our internet download speed can vary during the day.
Now, the download speed for your computer will also vary, depending on the download speed you're paying for from your internet service provider. At our house, our download speed is nominally 100 Mbps (megabits per second). How fast is that, you might ask? The following graph (which I 'borrowed' from blogger Leo Notenboom, https://newsletter.askleo.com/), using downloading the Bible as an example, will clarify various download speeds. Remember dial-up? I do. What would have taken me 12 minutes to download the Bible, some years ago on dial-up, has dropped to 0.4 seconds. Nice improvement!
Hope all this helps in your understanding of bandwidth and download speeds. It did for me. And I hope I got the above more or less right, as I'm certainly no self-proclaimed expert in bandwidth. Any corrections or clarifications, please let me know.
The Bible as a unit of bandwidth
This has nothing to do with the contents of the Bible. Believe in it or not as you see fit. This is about its size. You’ve probably seen one, perhaps even own one, and have a good sense for how big it feels, how hefty it is, and how long it might take to read it cover to cover.
The Bible is a fairly sizeable common frame of reference. You can download the text of The Bible from project Gutenberg as plain text, meaning the file contains only the text of The Bible in its simplest form.
A text-only copy in this digital form is 4,452,519 bytes. For our purposes, I’m going to round that up to an even 5,000,000 bytes, or five megabytes.
Five megabytes at eight bits per byte is roughly 40,000,000 bits. One Bible, 40 million bits.
Bible time
Let’s compare some common bandwidth figures and see how long it would take to transfer The Bible at each of those rates.
Connection Type Common Bandwidth One Bible Download
Old, slow, dial-up 28kbps 23 minutes
Max dial-up 56kbps 12 minutes
Very basic ADSL 768kbps 52 seconds
T-1 / DS1 1.5mbps 27 seconds
High-speed ADSL (example) 24mbps 1.7 seconds
Cable (example) 100mbps 0.4 seconds
Gigabit 1gbps 0.04 seconds
Jim Hamm