While I was waiting in the customer service line in the office of one of the local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) I could not help but overhear someone’s complaint.
Against a polite company employee an irate gringo was inveighing that he had signed up for 5MB per second internet speed but was getting only 5Mb per second. Let me put that another way. He was fuming that he thought he had signed up for 5MBps internet but was getting only 5Mbps. Still not clear? This fellow was upset because the ISP was delivering him a broadband internet connection speed of 5 megabits per second when he though he should be entitled to 5 megabytes per second. “Bits or bytes, what’s the difference?” he demanded of the employee who could only smile and try to explain why 5 megabits per second broadband speed is not 5 megabytes of data per second.
There is a little difference between bits and bytes, just as one could say there is a little difference between a millimeter and a centimeter, or an inch and a foot.
A bit, short for “binary digit,” is the smallest unit of measurement used for information storage in computers. A bit is represented by a 1 or a 0 with a value of true or false. Eight bits form a byte of information. This means if you wanted to convert bits to bytes you could move the decimal one place and be about as accurate as converting pesos to dollars at ten-to-one (close but not exact).Traditionally, a byte is a measurement of size while a bit is a measure of speed. A lowercase “b” always stands for “bits” while an uppercase B always stands for “bytes.” Mbps is megabits per second while MBps is megabytes per second. These standard abbreviations were perfectly understandable to the engineers who designed networking protocols decades ago, but if they had known that today the public would need to embrace some understanding of these they might have come up with a better methodology than using upper and lower case of the same letter. I definitely have worries about someone running this column through a spell checker that might change an uppercase B to lower case b or vice versa. It has become common to see “bits” spelled out (Kbits, Mbits, etc.) and this avoids problems with the spell checker making unwanted changes that would completely change the values.
The reason bits are grouped into bytes is for the convenience of us humans who find it easier to read alpha-numeric characters rather than long strings of binary. For example, the IP address of your home router might be “192.168.1.254” and this same number in binary bits would be “11000000. 10101000. 00000001. 11111110”. Computers are perfectly happy with bits of binary, but personally I am glad the computer lets me type in the letter “A” with one keystroke rather than “01000001” which is the letter “A” in bits.
Almost all size references consumers hear related to computers are expressed in bytes; kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, etc. It is also acceptable for local file transfer speeds to be expressed in bytes, and this is the root cause of unending confusion for some users. When testing your internet connection speed on any of the popular speed test sites, your results will be reported in kilobits per second or megabits per second; bits not bytes.
This is not the work of some slick marketing types who thought it makes your speed look faster by using the smaller unit to measure broadband connection speeds. Bits was the standard many decades before Telmex, Megacable, or any other ISP provided internet connections to the public.
Now that you understand all this it might be a good time to go back and reread the introductory paragraph which might make sense to you now.
Occasional Reporter contributor Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with more than 20 years IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted through his web site at SMAguru.com.