Yes, bandwidth basically refers to the carrying capacity of the wire.
The analogy of the hoses is one way to think of it, though in the case
of the DSL connection to the Team.Net server here in my basement, one
may wish to think of it more as a corroded, slightly kinked 1/8" brake
line.
Actually, the internet connection isn't too bad. The servers here pump out 3
to 4 million email messages a month, serve up about 2,000 web pages per hour
and 2 or 3 thousand FTP connections a day. There aren't too many chances for
the little blinking lights on the Cisco box to take a rest.
And I do wonder how much of that traffic could be avoided. A while back I was
looking at some statistics of some of the email lists, and it wasn't uncommon
to see 60 to 70 percent of the bits the list pushed out were just yet another
copy of something already sent. A couple of the lists were even into the
neighborhood of 85 percent included replies. Roughly speaking, that's like
buying a 6 pack of your favorite beverage and finding out that one can is
new product, the other 5 cans are, uh, well, they've already been processed.
So the Death Trailer came into being. You know, the line at the bottom of
many Team.Net lists that says 'Edit your replies' It has had some success,
folks who have their email programs set to just automatically include the
entire original message in their response have their messages sent to the bit
bucket. So the overhead of the extra lines on each message is a good
investment, keeping a lot of uneccessary bits from clogging up that 1/8" brake
line.
But of course, nothing is foolproof. There are folks that for some unknown
reason "edit their replies" by just removing the trailer lines, and not doing
anything to cull out what isn't needed in the rest of their replies. Of
course, that isn't an issue on the moderated list :) Sad to say, I guess
basic courtesy is just an unknown concept to some people.
mjb.
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