Basics of network bandwidth, latency, and jitter
I’m certainly no Salman Khan of the Khan Academy, but I’ve been doing my little animated presentations for some time and Khan has giving me some inspiration to use YouTube to keep trying the video form factor. I was asked to explain the concept of network latency to someone who found this article on Wall Street’s speed wars fascinating using something other than geek talk, so I created this tutorial explaining what is bandwidth, latency, and jitter.
The following is a short 7 minute video I posted on YouTube. As always, feedback and comments are welcome.
Sorry about three places towards the end where audio was recorded too loudly and clipped. The recording software didn’t filter out the clipping and these are some of the minor issues I need to hammer out next time. Also note that the 123 miles per millisecond for the “speed of light” quoted is the speed of light in fiber optic cabling. Light travels significantly faster in air and space, around 186 miles per millisecond. And of course, my delivery is certainly not as smooth as Mr. Khan, but I’m hopeful that you’ll find the information simple to understand.
One other interesting note is the YouTube switches to a very low bitrate even for the 1080P version of this video which is fine because of the very static nature of the video. Normal 1080P gets 3.5 Mbps for the video stream but this clip uses less than a megabit per second. That’s understandable because it’s easy to compress with very little loss in quality. I would also note that the same thing is done for the Khan Academy videos. Now I’ve uploaded similarly static content before but they didn’t get the low bandwidth treatment. I wonder if it’s because of the all black background I use which is similar to Khan Academy videos. The bottom line is that it makes this video very bandwidth friendly and much more accessible to people with slower broadband connections.
Thank you
George,
Thank you for this video great work! I’m really looking forward to the next round where you cover ways of addressing those problems.
The video also got me curious about the quality of my connections. Is there a way end users can do this same type of analysis? Or does measurements like that require access to the full connection path?
@Garrett
There’s a simple way to measure.
1. Open a command line with Start -> run -> cmd
2. Tracert -d google.com (note that you only need first 4 hops or so.)
3. Find the first traceable hop beyond your home router. In most connections, you’ll find that it’s around 12ms. Let’s say that IP address is “24.89.22.1″.
4. Type ping -t 24.89.22.1
5. Hit control-C when you’ve had enough samples. Each ping is spaced 1 second apart.
From that, you can trim it to just the raw data and analyze it in Excel.
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