The big deal about bandwidth: and what it all really means to you. Travis Anton It's hard to read something about the Web without hearing someone say "bandwidth". Just what does the whole idea of bandwidth really mean, though? How does it fit into the context of your job designing web pages? Under stand those two things, and you will have an advantage to get ahead in the game. In a nut shell the whole Internet is nothing but a bunch of wires that connect a bunch of computers together, simple enough. It doesn't get complicated until you take into account that these wires are different sizes, some able to carry a lot of data at once and some able to carry only a little data at once. It gets even more complicated when looking at how these wires are connected together. There are traffic jams and bottle-necks that limit the effective flow of data. __ I'll use our own connection set-up as an example. BoxTop has a direct fiber-optic connection to our local ISP. That line can carry 100 MBITS of data per second, roughly 100 times as much as a T1 line can carry. Then that line connects to a single puny T1 line that connects to the ISP's upstream provider. Five other T1 lines also connect to that lone T1 line making the connection to the upstream provider. That is what a bottle neck is, but it isn't the only bottle neck. Once data we send to the rest of the Internet manages to make it to the upstream provider then another bottle-neck occurs, much like the first only worse. Then even more T1 lines from more locations all converge and are finally routed to a backbone network by way of just two individual T1 lines. What is the reality of bandwidth? Special Thanks to Travis Anton... creator of ImageVice, PhotoGIF, ProJEPG and GIFmation -- programs designed for Web designers to meet the bandwidth challenge of Web design. Copyright 1997 BoxTop Software, Inc. All rights reserved.