Could someone explain bandwidth?

[mjkovis]

I am having a lot of trouble calculating bandwidth within a server. Can someone explain this?

Alright, my personal cable internet is 3m down/256k up. What does this mean exactly? Does this mean if a site/server allows me to, I can download at how many KB per second?

Now, I am running a game server and I have a redirect server to send people/players to so that they may download needed files for certain games. By increasing my bandwidth on the domain I can increase their download time within heavy server traffic, correct? If I were to power up to a 500GB bandwidth rate, what would this mean? If I were to have 10 people downloading the same file how many KBps would they get, maximum allowed?

If you have trouble following please ask.

[bob_man_uk]

3mb down and 256 up means that if someone was connecting to your server or you were downloading something the max possible speed you could get is 3mb/s however if you were to send something or somone were to download something FROM you, the max speed they could get is 256k. although this sounds a bit out of wack, i have 2mb down and 768k up (or something along those lines) who are you with may i ask?

as for your second question, the more bandwidth you have obviously the more people you can have connecting to your server however, you may need to get some sort of load balancing set up or a cap on how much bandwidth a single connection can use otherwise it could get a bit hairy,

i dont quite get the 500gb bandwidth, usually thats a cap on the ammount of bandwidth you can use, eg 500GB a month any more used after that and your screwed, at least thats what it sounds like to me, or it could be a REALLY fat pipe up to 500gb/s in which case if there were 10 users connecting depending on whether you have capped their downloads or load balanced, they would probably get 50mb/s each, but again since most users wont have anywhere near that they should only be able to get as fast as their lines can handle, if the prior is the case it would again depend on the transfer speed and not the bandwidth cap.

i really have one rule of thumb: connection speeds are only as fast as the bottleneck, which in most cases is as fast as the users can get it, usually 2mb/s (unless you have super-duper 8mb broadband)

if you dont understand, just ask.

matty

[HAL9000]

8 bits to a byte... your 3Mb connection equates to a max of 384 kilobytes per second from the internet to your server, 256 kilobit upload equates to 32 kilobytes per second from your server to the internet.

So, if I connect to your server, the best speed I will get is 32 kilobytes per second as that is the fastest you can send data out. If I were to upload a file to you, the fastest I can upload is 384 kilobytes per second provided that my ISP service allows me to upload that fast (which it does).

[mjkovis]

Originally Posted by bob_man_uk who are you with may i ask?

I am with Charter Communications cable company. Over all I am happy, although I with the upload side was a bit better.

Anyways, both your explanations clear everything up. I actually did not read the fine print about the 'bandwidth' for each tier of service. The 500GB bandwidth is the cap of data transfer per month. Now does this mean uploading and downloading is all added into the total? So, anyone downloading from the server and what I upload onto the server goes within this cap? I am taking it as a yes, but please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks!

Ice

[HAL9000]

I would take that as a maximum allowable volume of transfer in either direction (totalled) for the month