Have you ever been downloading an important file, waiting and watching as the progress bar slowly creeps to the right, and thought, “375k per second? Why is it going so slow? I’m paying for 3 meg download! Why isn’t it downloading at 3 megs? And where’s that pie?!”
Well, I can’t help you with the pie, but I can explain why you see such a disparity in numbers between what the cable or DSL company lists on your bill, and what your download window shows. And it’s rather sneaky and underhanded on the part of your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
This disparity can be blamed on the difference between bits and bytes, and the subtle and often overlooked difference in annotating these units of measure. To fully explain this, we’ll need to talk about the very fundamental ways computers work.
A bit is a binary digit, used to measure a single piece of information. It’s either a 1 or a 0, on or off, or a magnetic charge of either positive or negative. The bit is denoted as b. Please note, that’s a lowercase b.
A byte is 8 bits worth of information. This provides 256 possible combinations of 1s and 0s. For all intents and purposes, we’ll call this the basic unit of storage in today’s personal computers. Bytes are (most often) denoted as B. Please note, that’s an uppercase B.
And herein lies the crux of our disparity.
When you’re signing up for internet service, your ISP tells you that you can get 3Mbps download speeds. Now, let’s take a closer look at this: “Mbps” means Mega bits per second. So basically your ISP is telling you that you can download 3 million 1s or 0s per second. When you’re downloading something from the internet, however, your download window is showing your speed as 375KB/sec. Remember, a lowercase b means bit, while an uppercase B means byte. And since there are 8 bits in a byte, your download window is telling you that you’re downloading 375,000 groups of 1s and 0s per second.
So, if you take the total number of bits that your ISP is letting you download, and divide it by 8 (since that’s how many of those little buggers are in each of the bytes that your web browser is measuring) you’ll see that 3 million bits divided by 8 equals 375,000 bytes.
Make sense?
So while it may look like you’re getting cheated by your service provider, they’re actually just using creative marketing to kind of polish the numbers.
I love tech, but don’t have as much time or money to spend on it as I’d like. I get what I need to sustain my Geek vicariously through other sources and pass it along to you.
