what is bandwith? how do you lose bandwith? can your isp tell if youve lost bandwith?

Question

do you lose bandwith if you upload files or if you download files?

Answer 1

Bandwidth is two things. 1. Thinking of it in terms of plumbing, it's how wide your pipes are. 2. Sometimes it's used to measure how much data you send through the pipes.

1. The bandwidth for my FiOS connection at home is 5Mbps.
2. On my webhost, they allow 10GB bandwith (data transfer) per month.

Answer 2

Bandwidth (spelled correctly) is amount of data which you are able to send and receive measured in time and generally refers to speed with which you are able to connect to internet. Usually while buying service your ISP offers some theoretical speeds lat say
3 mbps (mega bytes per second) downstream speed
1 mbps – upload speed.

Factual speed of connection however usually varies during day and is depended from general traffic on Internet eventually some local troubles as for instance some ISP’s servers down.

To make analogy to water pipe, width of pipe determines how fast you can transfer water through it. Wider the connecting pipe the more water can flow through it and less time it will take to fill let say bucket than from narrow pipe.

Some better Speed test pages:

http://netspeed.stanford.edu/
http://ciseweb100.cise-nsf.gov:7123/

PS.
IT Pro answered this before I managed and used same analogy.