Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data that a network connection can carry in a given period, usually measured in bits per second, such as megabits (Mbps) or gigabits (Gbps). It describes capacity rather than speed: a wide connection can move a lot of data at once, while latency measures how long each piece takes to arrive. In finance, bandwidth matters for trading platforms, payment processors and data centres that handle large volumes of messages. For blockchains, it is one of the resources a full node must supply, since nodes download and relay every block and transaction. Larger block sizes or higher transaction throughput raise the bandwidth needed to run a node, which is one reason scaling debates touch on decentralization. Also see Bit (Computing) and Bottleneck.