You work for a small city IT department and you have a custo

You work for a small city IT department and you have a customer in City Hall who complains that the network is slow. What do you tell her about how network speeds can be affected?

A. The network bandwidth varies throughout the day because the ISP serving City Hall manually adds or subtracts bandwidth based on overall customer use in the Internet backbone.

B. The network bandwidth always remains at its peak capacity and the network slowness is only perceived by the customer, since she is downloading several large data files from the Internet and she believes they should download faster.

C. The network bandwidth remains the same but is affected by different factors that cause delays or latency on the network, such as heavy traffic, or network equipment that is temporarily down.

D. Network traffic consists of two components, bandwidth and latency, where bandwidth is the speed at which the computer works to produce data and latency is the limitation of how quickly the computer’s NIC can transfer computer data to the network.

Solution

C. Bandwidth describes the data transmission capacity of a network connection, but just because your network is supposed to operate at a particular speed, that doesn’t mean you will always experience that speed. A network’s bandwidth is limited by a number of factors that are collectively referred to as latency. Network latency is anything that tends to slow traffic down, including the number of users that have to share a network segment, the amount of traffic traversing the gateway, and any network equipment, either locally or on the Internet, that may not be operating or not operating correctly.