ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Bandwidth-sharing game

Imagine you have a big bowl of candy and three of your friends want to share it with you. However, you don't want to give all the candy to just one friend because that would be unfair to the other friends. So you decide to share the candy equally among all your friends.

This is kind of like a bandwidth-sharing game. Bandwidth is like the bowl of candy, and your friends are like the different applications or services on the internet that want to use it.

Just like how you didn't want to give too much candy to one friend and not enough to the others, internet service providers (ISPs) don't want one application using up all the bandwidth and slowing down everything else. So, they use a system to divide the bandwidth equally among different applications.

However, just like how you might have to take away some candy from one friend and give it to another to make it fair, ISPs might have to adjust the bandwidth allocation based on current usage to make sure everyone is getting a fair share. This way, no single application is hogging up all the bandwidth and slowing down the rest of the internet.



In conclusion, a bandwidth-sharing game is like sharing candy equally among friends, where ISPs divide the bandwidth fairly between different applications on the internet so that no single application can use too much and slow everything else down.