Bandwidth refers to the amount of data delivered over a network connection in a given interval. It is a crucial metric in scenarios where a software application sends or receives massive amounts of data, such as when:
- Performing a system update
- Downloading a new software
- Uploading a video to Instagram/YouTube
- Downloading music
- Watching a TV series on Netflix
On the other hand, latency is the time it takes for a short message (a data packet) to travel from the sender’s destination and come back with a response from the receiver’s destination. You can measure it via round-trip-time (RTT). Low latency is critical in the following applications:
- Chatting/video conferencing
- Online games
- Web browsing
These are applications that are more interactive in nature and require more real-time processing.
How Does Latency Affect User Experience?
Several recent studies found that increased capacity is not sufficient and will produce poor results without addressing latency.
Today, most businesses use VOIP technology to communicate with their employees and clients. They can improve their interactions by optimizing latency. According to a study, the VOIP Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of around 0.005 MOS indicates a latency of 177 ms. When latency increases by 20ms, this score will likely drop by 0.13 MOS points for each increase.
The page load time is one of the most fundamental elements in a website’s user experience. RTT latency can affect the page load time. The higher the round trip time is, the more time it takes for each resource to download. Therefore, RTT increase can improve page load time by more than a factor of 10.
How Bandwidth Affects User Experience?
Bandwidth is not a crucial consideration when downloading small files, accessing emails and browsing the web – scenarios when information exchange is significantly small. High Bandwidth is essential when you download large files from a site. For example, you will need an hour to download a 1GB file with a 2Mbps connection, which a 50Mbps connection can download in less than three minutes.
Tips to Improve Connection Speed By Optimizing Latency
Here are some tips that you can follow to optimize your latency.
- Use a CDN, especially if your visitors are dispersed around the globe. As this study shows, it can improve your performance by 50%.
- Adopt HTTP/2 as it can minimize the number of round trips.
- Implement browser caching. It ensures that your browser stops making repeat calls to the server.
Tips to Improve Connection Speed By Optimizing Bandwidth
Here are some tips that you can follow to optimize your Bandwidth.
- Implement WAN optimization tools. This way, you can use techniques like caching to minimize the amount of traffic required to traverse WAN connections.
- Migrate applications to the cloud to offload your traffic to the cloud service provider.
Lastly, if you are looking to improve your network speed and outpace your competitors, then adopt REZRV – a solution that optimizes Bandwidth with a set of groundbreaking techniques.