Q&A: When we sign up to broadband why is the service sold in ‘bits per second” but our allowance is in gigabytes?
Question by Cody: When we sign up to broadband why is the service sold in ‘bits per second” but our allowance is in gigabytes?
How do they measure these units when selling broadband service to customers?
It’s so confusing!
Any input would be appreciated.
Thanks
Cody
Best answer:
Answer by Adrian
Bits sound bigger, and network bandwidth is usually measured in bits. That comes from older days, when each transition of a signal was an on or off – one bit. (like old 300 baud modems – 300 bits/sec)
It just stuck…
However, modern computers store data in bytes, hence most downloads are in bytes. Usually 8 bits=1byte. In the old days, 300 baud meant one start bit, 8 data bits, one stop bit, so it actually used 10 bits to get one byte of data across…
Download allowances are in bytes, because they are using computers to count the bytes that go across in the packets – it’s simpler to count the bytes with a computer than calculate bits….
Give your answer to this question below!
Yeah i understand how confusing it is, i used to work for sky broadband but before i did i thought mbps ment megabytes per second but its megabits per second, So for example an upto 8meg connection would be 1 megabyte per second but like the other answer said its probably to make it sound faster to unsuspecting consumers than what it actually is, 8megabits sounds better than 1megabyte. They have your allowance in gigbytes because it would be hard as 8gigabits would be 1gigabyte , thus making a 40gb usage cap 320gigabits , That would complicate matters more than what they actually are.