What is Bandwidth?

In plain English

Bandwidth is how much information your internet connection can carry at once. The easiest way to picture it is a motorway: a wider road with more lanes lets more cars through at the same time, so traffic flows freely. A narrow, two-lane road clogs up the moment lots of cars turn up. Your internet works the same way, and bandwidth is the number of lanes.

When several people in the house are streaming a film, on a video call, and downloading updates all at once, they are all sharing those lanes. If you have plenty of bandwidth, everything keeps moving smoothly. If you don't, things slow to a crawl and pages take an age to load. It's usually measured in "megabits per second" (Mbps) — a bigger number means more lanes.

Why it matters

For a home, low bandwidth is why a video call freezes the moment someone else starts watching Netflix, or why catch-up TV keeps buffering. For a small business, it can mean cloud apps crawling, video meetings dropping out, and card payments timing out — all of which cost you time and patience. Knowing it's a bandwidth issue (rather than a broken computer) saves you worrying that something is seriously wrong, and points you at the right fix.

What to do

• Test your speed. Search "speed test" in your web browser and run a free one. Compare the result to what your provider promised — if it's far lower, that's worth a call to them.
• Check who else is online. Big downloads, Windows updates, and several devices streaming at once all eat your bandwidth. Pausing one often frees things up straight away.
• Move closer to the router, or use a cable. Wi-Fi weakens through walls and over distance. An Ethernet cable to your router gives the steadiest connection for an important call.
• Restart the router if things feel sluggish — switch it off for 30 seconds and back on. It clears a surprising number of slowdowns.
• Don't rush to upgrade your package. Sometimes the issue is an old router or weak Wi-Fi, not the amount of bandwidth you're paying for. It's worth checking before spending more each month.

How 365 Techies can help

If your internet feels slow and you're not sure whether it's the connection, the router or the computer, we're happy to take a look and tell you honestly what's going on — for homes and small businesses across Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch and Dorset.

Related: Router · Modem · Ethernet · Megabytes & gigabytes — or browse the full A–Z jargon buster.