Contention ratio
Lets say that you have a 2Mbps broadband connection down from the Internet. Sometimes you will find that you only achieve 1Mbps speed, and sometimes less.
This is because your supplier has other customers with a nominal 2Mbps connect speed, but your provider will have a limit on their bandwidth. So say for example your provider has 100 Mbps connection to the Internet. 50 customers running 2Mbps connections at the same time will fill that 100Mbps bandwidth.
Unfortunately it may be that your provider has 1000 customers. They can't all be running 2Mbps connections at the same time. So the concept of contention ratio is used. If we imagine that at any one time 50 of the 1000 users are online simultaneously then the contention ratio is 1000:50 or 20:1.
Most Internet providers operate at up to 50:1 contention ratio. Professional business providers like our sponsor will always maintain the lowest contention ratios possible.
