Not at all!
The difference between ‘MB’ and ‘Mb’ is common knowledge to the IT crowd and the more technologically literate web surfers out there. However, it turns out that, understandably enough, many punters who are getting connected to the information superhighway for the first time don’t know the difference between the two.
Unfortunately, it’s not simply a case of ‘you say tomato’, as there is quite a difference. An ‘Mb’ (with a lowercase ‘b’) is short for a MegaBit, whereas an ‘MB’ (with a capital ‘B’) is short hand for a MegaByte. A single Byte is the same as 8 bits meaning that 1MB is equal to 8Mb.
This is relevant to broadband customers, as you will note that whenever you are looking at services they will always have their connection speeds measured in Mbps (Megabits Per Second) to make it look like it is faster, in the same way that broadcasting weather reports in Fahrenheit makes places seem hotter.
This is particularly confusing when you consider that monthly data allowances and free webspace is measured in Bytes (GB or MB) and the speed isn’t.
Whilst this might be elementary computer knowledge for some of you, it turns out some customers are confused and potentially being misled - we’re just posting this up for clarification purposes, in case you were wondering why you weren’t getting a full 20MBpbs download speed down a Virgin Media XL cable connection, or being able to stream 16MB of photos a second through your Sky Max package.
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JS said on 03 Jul 2008 at 10:04 am #
I have always personally found that your maximum speed is essentially your connection speed divided by 10. For example, when I had 2mb broadband, I was getting 200 kb/s downloads. Now I have a 6mb connection, and I can get little over 600 kb/s.