The study of the basics of computer literacy in a school informatics lesson or with the help of a self-study manual necessarily includes a section on units of measurement of information volumes. Every user is familiar with the simplest of them, but it is far from always possible to apply knowledge in practice.
BY TOPIC: How to download files, documents, videos and music to iPhone and iPad from the Internet.
One of the common problems of a modern inexperienced gadget owner with access to the Web is determining the speed of the Internet, because a rare provider provides a channel that matches the characteristics prescribed in the contract. And taking into account objective reasons and problems on the subscriber’s side (outdated router, malware, cable damage, etc.), the speed is usually several times lower than the declared one. However, there is another reason – confusion in megabits and megabytes.
- Mbit = Megabit = Mbit
- MB = Mbyte = Mbyte = MB = Megabyte
BY TOPIC: How to disable cellular data for specific apps on iPhone and iPad.
The technical support operator of any provider can easily name the program that causes the majority of calls from subscribers complaining about low Internet speed – this is uTorrent. The fact is that everyone’s favorite software for downloading pirated content shows download speed in megabyteswhile the generally accepted internet speed measurement is megabit (Mbit), which, as you might guess, contains 8 times less information (1 MB = 8 Mbit). That is, even if the provider and the subscriber’s own equipment provide an Internet connection at the speed of receiving incoming packets (download speed) 100 Mbpsthen downloading a movie in Full HD quality “weighing” 9,000 MB will not take at all 9000 / 100 = 90 secondsa 9000 / (100/8) = 12 minutes.
In other words, on a network with a bandwidth of 100 Mbps (Megabits) per second, the download speed of a file will be 100 / 8 = 12.5 MB (Megabytes) per second, and not 100 MB (Megabytes) per second.
Why is there such confusion? There is no exact answer to this question, but marketing is the most likely cause. After all, even an experienced user, reading an advertising brochure from a new provider in his city, hardly divides the speed indicated there in megabits by eight.
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