Although I posted this in a specific thread about slow download speeds, I thought it might be useful for general consideration :-
The following info is relevant to live data throughput :-
"The bandwidth of a link is the theoretical maximum amount of data that could be sent over that channel without regard to practical considerations. For example, you could pump 10^9 bits per second down a Gigabit Ethernet link over a Cat-6e or fiber optic cable. Unfortunately this would be a completely unformatted stream of bits.
To make it actually useful there's a start of frame sequence which precedes any actual data bits, a frame check sequence at the end for error detection and an idle period between transmitted frames. All of those occupy what is referred to as "bit times" meaning the amount of time it takes to transmit one bit over the line. This is all necessary overhead, but is subtracted from the total bandwidth of the link.
And this is only for the lowest level protocol which is stuffing raw data out onto the wire. Once you start adding in the MAC addresses, an IP header and a TCP or UDP header, then you've added even more overhead.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame. Similar problems exist for other transmission media."
Source :-
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24246446/throughput-and-bandwidth-difference
The following info is relevant to live data throughput :-
"The bandwidth of a link is the theoretical maximum amount of data that could be sent over that channel without regard to practical considerations. For example, you could pump 10^9 bits per second down a Gigabit Ethernet link over a Cat-6e or fiber optic cable. Unfortunately this would be a completely unformatted stream of bits.
To make it actually useful there's a start of frame sequence which precedes any actual data bits, a frame check sequence at the end for error detection and an idle period between transmitted frames. All of those occupy what is referred to as "bit times" meaning the amount of time it takes to transmit one bit over the line. This is all necessary overhead, but is subtracted from the total bandwidth of the link.
And this is only for the lowest level protocol which is stuffing raw data out onto the wire. Once you start adding in the MAC addresses, an IP header and a TCP or UDP header, then you've added even more overhead.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_frame. Similar problems exist for other transmission media."
Source :-
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24246446/throughput-and-bandwidth-difference
