gigabits or gigabytes?

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joshd

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what is the difference, i any between bit and bytes?

eg, CAT6 ethernet cables can transfer 1GigaBIT per second. is this the same as one gigaBYTE per second?
 
so when people brag that they have a 2megaBYTE per second broardband connection, they dont, they have an 1/8 of that speed?
 
bits and bytes are just unit, and I think because those old old machine run with 8 bits, so they just make the term "byte" to call it

remind me if those IT exam conversion question I failed ><
 
Re:

Hello,

2MB/s or 2 Megabytes per second commercial internet connections do not exist. People make a good habit at commonly confusing and referring to high speed broadband internet connections to be at speeds of Megabytes per second, when in fact they are actually at Megabits per second.

Megabytes and Megabits are not synonyms, just as centimeters and meters are not synonyms. They are different units of measure.

Many people confuse Kilobytes (KB) with Kilobits (Kb), and falsely use them interchangeably. Same with Megabyts (MB) with Megabits (Mb) or Gigabytes (GB) with Gigabits (Gb). Alot of people assume that a small case b and large case B refer to the same capacity, however they don't. The small case b refers to bits whereas the large case B refers to bytes.

For reference, you can convert units of bits using the following bit calculator:

http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/

So in calculation, a 2Mb/s internet connection is equivelant to 0.25MB/s. Therefore, the time it takes to download, say a legal MP3 file that's 3MB in size, is 3MB / 0.25MB = 12 seconds.

When you download files from the internet, speeds are usually quoted as Kilobytes per second, not Kilobits. Filesizes are usually displays in the byte form not bit form. This is probably why there's so much confusion.
 
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