quagmondo23

When I go to ISP sites, they have their speeds incredibly high but then I look at the small print and they say megabit not megabyte. This seems to be new as I have not seen it mentioned anywhere else. What's the math.

tremmor

just a unit of measurement.
bit is 1.
byte is 8 bits.
no diff (12" or 1 ft)

PohTayToez

That's correct, but you're using it in the wrong application.

When you're talking about storage, 1 bit is the smallest unit of measurement, but after 8 bits, you never see it referenced. For example, no one would ever describe a hard drive as storing 960Gb (gigabits). You would of course say it is a 120GB (gigabytes) hard drive. Also, because this system is based on powers of two, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, rather than 1000 as the prefix 'kilo' is normally interpreted as.

When talking about transfer speeds, bits are used, but not in the same way as storage. Because the rate at which data is transfered does not really rely on powers of two, the traditional prefix meanings are used. So, if you see a transfer speed of up to 10Mbs (Megabits per second), it really does mean 10^6 * 10 (10,000,000) bits per second, which would translate into about 1.192MBs (megabytes per second).

While this is somewhat deceiving every ISP in existence does the same thing, so it's not as if you would be fooled if you were comparing speeds of two different providers. However, they are deceiving in the way that they often advertise speeds as being "10 Megs per second" or "10Mb per second" which when heard verbally could mean either 10MBs or 10Mbs.

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tremmor

PohTayToez
Now ya got me confused. Its interesting but i ain't got a clue what your talking about. could you expand on this subject some more?
thanks

laymans terms of course.
keep it simple now.

[-0MEGA-]

Divide it by 8 and you get the real download/upload speed.

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jjsevdt

It's pretty simple Bit represents 1 digit either a 1 or 0. Byte represents 8 digits, acollection of 1's and 0's.

Bit is used for transfer speeds and byte for storage.

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Motoxrdude

Byte refers to one line of binary code, which is 8 digits(bit) long

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quagmondo23

Thanks for your help. I understand it now.

zaroba

a simpler explination is that there speed and offers sound much better when they say its a 1.5mb connection instead of a 187.5kb connection.

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PohTayToez

Not quite... try reading the entire thread next time.

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