Glossary · Performance
Bandwidth
The volume of data a proxy can move, and the unit residential and mobile proxies are typically billed by.
Bandwidth is how much data you can push through a connection, and for proxies it is both a performance ceiling and, usually, the thing you pay for. Residential and mobile pools are billed by the gigabyte because their supply is metered by real underlying connections, which makes traffic, not addresses, the resource you are buying.
That billing model rewards efficiency. Since you pay per gigabyte, fetching only what you need, skipping images you will not parse, requesting compact responses, directly lowers cost, which is a discipline that matters far less on a flat-rate datacenter plan.
Bandwidth and latency are independent, and conflating them is a common mistake. A high-bandwidth link can still be high-latency, plenty of capacity, long round trip, and vice versa. Bulk collection lives and dies on bandwidth and concurrency; interactive work feels latency first.
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