Why is speed of internet connection generally described in megabits/second whereas the size of a file is in megabytes/second? Is it purely for ISPs to make their offered connection seem faster than it actually is to the average internet user?
In: Technology
It started in bits long ago, when not everything used 8 bits per char. There is no reason to change, it will make your product seem 8x slower than everybody else.
https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/why-do-we-use-bits-measure-internet-speed-but-bytes-measure-data
> it is because the internet delivers those bytes of data as single bits at a time. And because those bits sometimes come out of order and from different server locations, it’s both more accurate and more intuitive to measure speed as a factor of the number of bits per second that an internet connection is capable of transmitting, not the total number of memory units, or bytes, it transmits.
The primary reason is historical and cultural, nothing to do with anything making sense. Back when they were invented the world of computers and the world of telecommunications were very different, used different jargon, had different experts, published in different journals, were dominated by different companies.
The rise in popularity of the internet helped force those two worlds together but they still came from different backgrounds and emphasized different things when talking about their technology. Telecoms used bits per second, and a kilobit meant 1000. Computer people came to use bytes, where a kilobyte meant 1024, and when they needed to talk about data rates they started using bytes per second.
I suppose there are practical aspects mixed in there having to do with bytes that have a different number of bits, or the out-of-order deliver in the Internet protocol, but those are secondary and later. The original reason is the cultural divide.
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