A member posted me privately and explained his/her confusion about the terms 'bandwidth' and 'broadband'. There had been some discussion about leeching and sharing on the Morpheus forum and it was mentioned that 56kers (which our member also is) don't want to share too many files because they don't have the bandwidth. The member wanted to know if sharing more songs means also using more bandwidth.
First of all, your
bandwidth means simply the speed with which you can move data in (=downloading) and out (=uploading) of your computer. Upload and download speeds for the various connection types are often asymmetric. For example, a 56k modem gives you a download speed (=bandwidth) of 56.000 bits in a second while its upload speed is limited to 33.600 bits in a second. In kilobytes per second (kB/s) - which is the typical speed unit in filesharing clients - these figures correspond to 7 kB/s and 4 kB/s.
Broadband is a general term used for faster connections like cable and ADSL. Broadband connections are typically
fixed, in other words their users are online all the time. The slower connections (like your 56k modem) are
dial-ups that need to make phone call to the ISP to get connected to Internet.
So let us say your 56k modem gives you the mentioned 4 kB/s upstream bandwidth. This does not depend in any way on how many songs you share. The number of songs becomes relevant only when people start to share your upstream bandwidth. If there is only one uploader, he/she can upload at 4 kB/s. If there are two, each one gets his/her song at 2 kB/s, and so on. If you share a lot of good stuff, you are likely to get so many uploads that unless you limit their number, each uploader will get their stuff at ridiculously low speed. Therefore 56kers should allow only 1 or max 2 concurrent uploads and not share too much to avoid hopeless queuing times.
- tg
