I wonder if anyone who has bought BT broadband could tell me if their website speeds – advertised as “up to xx Mb download speed” – are megabytes or megabits?Been stung with one supplier thinking it was the former and turned out to be the latter.

I’ve just used BT “technical help chat” and come out non the wiser really:

me: Hi we’re looking at BT Infinity – could you tell us if the “Mb” download speeds on your website are Megabytes or Megabits?
Meheli: it is mega bytes or mbps
Meheli: Is there anything else I can help you with today?
me: Sorry, mbps is megabits, MBps is megabytes that is what I’m trying to be clear about
Meheli: bit: singular
Meheli: bytes: plural
Meheli: they are same
me: Sorry, the singular of ‘bits’ is ‘bit’! There are different units and there are eight bits to every byte. So it is an important difference
Meheli: you know the answer..
Meheli: we use as Mbps
Meheli: and spell it as megabytes
me: I am asking if your website is bits or bytes as they are two different speeds and it is not clear what is being stated
Meheli: it is bytes
me: Ok thanks for that
Meheli: I am sorry it is megabits
Meheli: confirmed with the supervisor.
Meheli: sorry for that
me: Ok thanks

So the voice of experience would be of great help! A

I would imagine megabits. Network speeds are (should) always specified in terms of bits per second.

I always though that although 1 byte = 8 bits normally, there is no rigid definition that 1 byte HAS to be 8 bits.

That transcript is 100% OF CLASS.

And what Graham said.

Either way, that conversation is hilarious!

TheBrick: yep. that’s why network speeds are given in bits I think, because it is system-agnostic.

Makes sense.Found a reference! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

The size of the byte has historically been hardware dependent and no definitive standards exist that mandate the size.

Yep funny transcript.

It’s bits. It’s always been bits. Everyone uses bits. What a stupid bloody question!

“What a stupid bloody question! “

The question’s not that stupid – if you were a techie you’d expect some stick for asking it but not a layman – but the answer, now that’s a stupid bloody answer 🙂

Of course it’s a stupid question. It’s like seeing carpet advertised in Sq M and asking if that’s metres or miles!

Name me one – any – network provider that has ever advertised their speed in Megabytes per second.

Anyway – convention is that megabyte is abbreviated as MB and megabit as Mb.

You’re quite right tho, “Mb” is completely the wrong prefix.

It should be specified as Mbit/s (or Mb/s or Mbps), but you can’t expect BT to know about telecoms…

Tremendous.

It’s cocknockers like him that give support a bad name. No wonder every halfwit thinks they can do it, when we’re employing people who have to check with their supervisor to tell the difference between bits and bytes.

Druid is correct, of course. Every ISP will advertise speeds in Mbps, it’s been that way since we used to refer just to bps and baud rates.

… or expect somebody to know the difference between a prefix, suffix and a unit!

“Of course it’s a stupid question. It’s like seeing carpet advertised in Sq M and asking if that’s metres or miles!“

Yeah, except that pretty much everyone deals with those units every day, making it quite obvious that carpets don’t come by the mile – whereas the majority of consumers don’t actually know what a bit or a byte are, let alone how people measure the quantity of knock-off music, kitten videos and naked ladies that they suck in through the wire in the wall.

Bits and bytes and the reasons why network speeds are in bits might be obvious to you or me, but it’s gobbledegook to most people.

Yep Bez, and we can’t expect them to learn when major companies insist on using the wrong suffix*.

.
* Yeah yeah, prefix/suffix. It’s late, I’ve had wine and I’m working while answering this nonsense.

the majority of consumers don’t actually know what a bit or a byte are

Thing is, they don’t need to. They just need to know that everyone’s using the same unit so that they can compare like with like(*), it could be gibbons per Venusian fortnight for the difference it makes.

(* – or at least, claimed up-to-like with claimed up-to-like)

most definately BITs not bytes! BB speeds are therefore 8 times slower than people expect!

That transcript is brilliant. Technician doesn’t know what he’s talking about, shocker!

But really. It’s bits. Bytes would be a capital B.

Amazing!

Generally, digital communication rates are measured in bits per second (b/s or bps) while stored digital information is measured in bytes (B). The 8-bit byte is a bit of a historical overhang: a byte is related to the size of a computer instruction (32 or 64 in most modern systems).

There is also an interesting overlap where information content of things (signals, images, books, clouds…) is measured in bits.

Cougar: who is using baud and for what? might not be old enough to remember, but that seems rather technical for most people (at least to me). For instance: 10GbE => 10.7GBd but 100GbE =>28GBd

Thing is, are the megabits 1024×1024 bits. Or 1000×1000 bits (as a lot of drive companies measure megabytes)..

Useless fact : a nibble is half a byte, or 4 bits

According to SI they should be decimal, so 1 Mbit/s is 1,000,000 bits per second.

Bytes do still make some sense, as each ASCII character is one byte.

“each ASCII character is one byte“

If we’re being picky, no, it’s 7 bits.

True, I’m thinking of the extended ASCII 🙂

What Bez said +1111101000

I leave you with one guess who learnt to count in Binary the other week, but as Bez says, how would the normal customer have a clue as I doubt a lot of techies even know the difference between bits and bytes.

not very sure of that ,but i’d like to google it and learn more !
thanks ! 🙂

The 8-bit byte is a bit of a historical overhang: a byte is related to the size of a computer instruction (32 or 64 in most modern systems).

A ‘byte’ is 8 bits. What you’re describing there is a ‘word.’

“Of course it’s a stupid question. It’s like seeing carpet advertised in Sq M and asking if that’s metres or miles!

If someone says something is 25.4mil wide, how wide is that in inches?

Useless fact : a nibble is half a byte, or 4 bits

I was going to say that, grr. And isn’t it nybble?

Threads like this are why we IT geeks get all the girls 🙂

A ‘byte’ is 8 bits. What you’re describing there is a ‘word.’

Not according to wiki. I was taught (way back in the day) that the size of a byte is arbitrary, but almost always 8 bits.

For the really geeky:

Kernighan & Ritchie defined a char in C as “character – a single byte”.

The C standard (C90, §5.2.4.2.1) only requires that CHAR_BIT (which defines the number of bits in a char) is at least 8 bits.

See also the C++ FAQ.

I think y’all find 8 bits is a dollar.

I was going to say that, grr. And isn’t it nybble?

can be nibble, nybble or nyble

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibble

ha that’s nothing the person in charge or IT on our site was going on about upgrading us to 56 bit Windows the other day

isn’t it nybble?

Only if you’re a git. (-: Alternative spelling.

Not according to wiki. I was taught (way back in the day) that the size of a byte is arbitrary, but almost always 8 bits

You’re (/ Wikipedia is) right, but not really for any practical means. It might’ve been arbitrary in the 50s but it hasn’t meant anything else for a long time.

ha that’s nothing the person in charge or IT on our site was going on about upgrading us to 56 bit Windows the other day

Did you have them escorted from the premises? I think I would.

it hasn’t meant anything else for a long time

Agreed, although odd things do still happen in the embedded world so we’re encouraged not to assume it (or at least assert it!).

The 8-bit byte is a bit of a historical overhang: a byte is related to the size of a computer instruction (32 or 64 in most modern systems).

Cougar beat me to it. Byte = 8 bits, word = register size of the CPU ie 32 or 64 bit for modern CPUs.

1024 bytes is a kibibyte 🙂

mol, it really isn’t. Read the wiki and the C++ FAQ I linked.

It’s true that usually byte=8 bits, but it isn’t/wasn’t always the case. Historically there were architectures with 9-bit, 10-bit, 12-bit and 36-bit bytes (CDC, PDP-8, PDP-10).

We’ve pretty much settled on x86 inspired architectures now, which are all 8-bit or multiples thereof. So a byte is almost always 8 bits. But it’s not correct to define a byte as being 8 bits.

Also in comms “a byte” may have extra start, stop and parity bits on it, as well as the 7 or 8-bits of data. Hence why they correctly use “octet” to refer to a group of 8-bits in comms specs.

GrahamS – you’re really not doing your image any good….