I want to talk about bandwidth, throughput, latency, and capacity, and how each of these items relates to one another.
Let me start all folksy with analogies. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider a medium-sized city that serves water to all its residents through one central reservoir. The reservoir’s capacity represents the total pool of water it can deliver at one time to residents through pipes of varying sizes and at different distances.
It’s actually a great explanation on how network bandwidth, latency, capacity, throughput and such work for folks who wouldn’t otherwise understand.