3. Bandwidth Bottleneck

Let's consider an everyday situation - viewing a web page. What is the bandwidth of this communication path?

The illustration below shows the various communication channels between your computer and the web server

You can see that the fastest link is within the telecom network itself at 10 Giga bits per second.

However, the slowest link is the low bandwidth link between the local ISP and the home router. This has typically a 13Mbps bandwidth for data downstream (fiber to box link) and an even lower 3 Mbps for upstream data. If you have a standard copper wire link to the exchange, then it is probably even lower.

Therefore the bandwidth of this network is effectively only 13 Mbps and the bottleneck is the link between the home router and the ISP.