bits and bytes

Emoclaw · 05 Jan 2013

Okay when I learned this I felt somehow sad.
but when ISPs offer you eg 50mbps, they don't really mean that you'll download with 50 MBytes/sec
because mbps = mega bits per second
8 bits = 1 byte
in this case 1 mega byte = 8 mega bits
So if we do 50 mega bits ÷ 8 it gives us 6.25mega bytes
-Yeah but that's not my download speed!
The speed also depends on the distance between the ISP's location and you so you should perform a speedtest and then do result ÷ 8 to find the true download speed.
I think most people will know this but this is the chillout room so I just wrote it.

Parman · 05 Jan 2013

Your correct big difference between Mb and MB.

Speedtest.net can actually set it to MB.

I believe your only distance limitations are on dsl connections.

Cable connection your bandwidth is shared amongst many people. This doesn't mean that your sharing your 50Mbps with everyone. This means if the cable company can provide 500Mbps connection to your neighborhood they will try to get as many people on the same line. This will sometimes cause your speeds to be slower.

Same thing goes with gigabit lan. Your speeds are actually 1024÷8= 128MBps.

SledgeDG · 05 Jan 2013

It's all part of the "Bigger is better" scheme :)
Same reason why hard drive manufacturers calculate a Megabyte = 1000Bytes (and not as it should 2^10 = 1024 Bytes)

-DG

Emoclaw · 06 Jan 2013

The real question is, why bits were created?I find them pointless.

Parman · 06 Jan 2013

Emoclaw said:

The real question is, why bits were created?I find them pointless.

Because of binary.

SledgeDG · 11 Jan 2013

Emoclaw said:

The real question is, why bits were created?I find them pointless.

parman is right Binary is the magic word here

Well look at it this way: What really happens inside a CPU (and in supporting chipsets, memory and storage devices too of course) there is just a ***load of tiny switches that can be either off or on (= 0 and 1

and because it's quite impractical to work with just zeros and ones alone those "bytes" were grouped by eights into Bits.
That enables you to express every number from 0 to 255 (binary:11111111) in just one byte.
So from there it evolved to Kilo bytes and ultimately to Yobi bytes (10 to the power of 24 which is a 10 with 24 zeros

Like I said a ***load of switched

More indepth here
-DG