When you go to buy a water pipe, there are two completely independent parameters that you look at: the diameter of the pipe and its length. Here is my bit in a language which I can understand Note, bandwidth in particular has other common meanings, I've assumed networking because this is stackoverflow but if it was a maths or amateur radio forum I might be talking about something else entirely. You don't often use bandwidth in this way. Throughput is also used in terms of whole systems ie Number of Dogs washed per day or Number of Bottles filled per hour. Sometimes throughput is talking about actual throughput ie a 100Mbit connection is the theoretical bandwidth and also the theoretical throughput in bps but highly unlikely to be what you'll actually get. The throughput of the actual network did not change but the application throughput did. When talking about throughput I hear it most in relation to an application ie the 1Gbit throughput example I gave assumed compression at some layer in the stack and we measured throughput there. Theoretical throughput and theoretical bandwidth are the same on this network but why am I saying the throughput is 1Gbit per second.

If I compress a 1000Mbit file to 100Mbit and send it over the 100Mbit line then my effective throughput could be considered 1Gbit per second. If we're doing this on a 100Mbit connection this is the theoretical bandwidth that we have i.e.

When a SYN packet is sent using TCP it waits for a SYN+ACK response, the time between sending and receiving is the latency.

Bandwidth vs throughput