Traffic is a generalized concept used to measure the amount of content received and received by a user from the Internet. This term comes from the English root and has its own special unit of measurement. Traffic is the aggregate amount of data that a user receives from the Internet and sends to the network over a given period of time.
Origin of the term
In Russian, the term "traffic" is a transcription of the English term "traffic", which means "movement" or "cargo turnover". At the same time, a similar term, interpreting the original concept somewhat differently, is also used to denote heavy traffic.
The borrowing of this term from the English language happened relatively recently, therefore, in the Russian-language spelling, a single version has not yet been established with respect to the word "traffic": in particular, in written speech you can find its spelling with both one letter "f" and with two, similarly English original.
The meaning of the term
The general term "traffic" is used to refer to the entire amount of information coming from the user to the present and to the user from the network. At the same time, it is customary among specialists to distinguish between two main types. The first of them is incoming traffic, that is, content downloaded by the user from the Internet. For example, if you download music or movies from the network, the amount of information received will be the amount of incoming traffic. The second type is outgoing traffic, that is, content sent by the user to the Internet. For example, you post your photos on a social network: in this case, you generate a stream of outgoing traffic.
On the Internet, there are special indicators designed to measure this volume. Thus, the amount of information is usually measured based on the use of a special unit - the byte. However, a byte is a very small value, therefore, in practice, derivatives from it are more often used - kilobyte, which is 1024 bytes, megabyte, which is 1024 kilobytes, gigabyte, which is 1024 megabytes, and so on.
However, for measuring traffic, not only its absolute volume is important, but also the speed, that is, the amount of information transmitted per unit of time. At the same time, the data transfer speed on the Internet is usually very high, therefore, very short time intervals, for example, seconds, are used to estimate it. As a result, quantities such as kilobytes per second or megabytes per second are commonly used as units for measuring Internet traffic. These metrics are used to measure the speed of both inbound and outbound traffic.
