Bandwidth and latency represent two fundamental and distinct metrics of network performance:

• Bandwidth measures the transmission capacity of a connection, indicating the volume of data that can be transferred per unit of time (e.g., data per second).
• Latency measures the delay or duration required for a packet of data to travel across the network from source to destination.

A prevalent misconception is that increasing bandwidth automatically reduces latency. However, link width and responsiveness are independent: a high-bandwidth connection that has long delays will still feel laggy and slow to respond.