I wish we could do a live demonstration on
television
It's been years, but when I talked with non-techie people to help
them understand the difference between bandwidth and latency I used
a familiar human-human task to get the ideas across. E.g., take a
group of people at the end of a work session, who are trying to
reach a consensus about where to go for lunch. When everyone's
sitting around a table, a quick discussion can happen and a decision
reached. Then make them all go to separate offices scattered
around the building and achieve a similar consensus, communicating
only by sending short notes to each other carried by volunteer
couriers (or perhaps 140-character SMS texts). The difference in
"latency" and its effect on the time it takes to finish the task
becomes clear quickly.
It seems like one could orchestrate a similar demonstration
targetted toward a non-technical audience -- e.g., members of some
government committee meeting in a room versus the same meeting with
participants scattered across the building and interactions
performed by staffers running around as "the network". Even if the
staffers can convey huge stacks of information (high bandwidth), the
time it takes for them to get from one member to others (latency)
quickly becomes the primary constraint.
This was also a good way to illustrate to non-techies how web pages
work, and why it sometimes takes a long time to get the entire page
loaded. Go to the library to get the text. Now go to the art
department to get the banners. Now go to the photo archives to get
the pictures. Now go to that customer to get the ads you promised
to show. .....