Very simply, bandwidth contention ratio tells you how many people you are sharing your bandwidth with.

Bandwidth is the amount of data (e.g. emails, web pages) that can be transferred over your internet connection in a given period of time (e.g. 2 megabits per second). Imagine your internet connection is a pipe, the bigger the pipe, the faster the information will flow.

The norm is that you will be sharing your bandwidth with other people who live nearby. The majority of broadband services offer a 50:1 bandwidth contention ratio - this means that you are sharing your bandwidth with 49 other people.

Your connection will therefore speed up or slow down depending on how many people in your locality are online. The less people online, the faster your internet will be.

Businesses in particular will sometimes pay extra for better contention ratios, or even a dedicated connection.