Firstly, I assume I'm a newbie in networking.
That can be a silly question, but I don't understand yet:

When someone signs up in a ISP to have internet in his/her home, ISP gives a bandwith, for example 5 Mbits/second.

And in big enterprises, for example in a university, do these type of companies have also a limited bandwith that its ISP gave them? What I don't know is if big enterprises have any trick that don't limit bandwith. And if it's so, then network bandwith is more difficult to have bottleneck? In other words, if I set up a server on my home, will it have less network bandwith than if I set up on a big enterprise network?

I don't know how to ask you that... but I think you've already understood my question.

Thanks in advance.

When you talk about home use, the bandwidth advertised is the maximum capacity of your connection. If it's DSL, it's the capacity of your phone line to the Telco DSL switch. If it's broadband cable, it's the capacity of the cable. Both of these rates only represent the maximum possible capacity you can obtain, not what the sustained throughput you can expect to see on a regular basis.

When you talk about business services like T1 or DS0, there is something in place called a Service Level Agreement(SLA.) The SLA determines your Committed Information Rate(CIR) and Access Rate. The CIR is the minimum guaranteed throughput of your connection. The Access Rate is the maximum capacity of the connection. For example, a T1 may have a CIR of 384kbps, and an Access Rate of 1.54mbps. Under normal circumstances, the subscriber will get their full 1.54mbps bandwidth. However, as data traffic at the ISP increases, they will start throttling the flow of traffic down to, but not below the CIR rate of 384kbps.

Generally speaking, businesses and Colleges use more bandwidth, and require high availability, so they pay more. And because they are using commercial services, they usually have much better upload speeds which are better suited to activities like hosting Web and FTP servers.

Ok, thanks. I now understand more about this.

Thanks.