Whenever I ask for the slow internet speed. My ISP always dividing speed of internet by 8 ! I could not understand why ?
2 Answers
The difference is bits versus bytes. Internet providers market their speeds in megabits, say 16 megabits per second for example. Except there are 8 bits in a byte, meaning that your speed in megabytes will be 2 megabytes per second. It's more of a marketing thing so they can show you a bigger number without lying to you.
Computers often measure their speed in megabytes, instead of megabits, so while you are downloading at 16 megabits per second, your computer is telling you it's only 2 megabytes per second.
There speed they advertise to you is also a 'maximum', so you will rarely ever get that actual speed.
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The reason it's bits is because that's the basic unit of measurement and comes from days of 14k and 56k modems which transmitted at a band and could transfer in bits/sec not kilobytes or megabytes per second– RamhoundCommented Jul 29, 2014 at 18:53
Because there are 8 bits in a byte. So if your line can transfer 800,000 bits per second, it can transfer 100,000 bytes per second.
answered Jul 29, 2014 at 18:33
