Today I want to talk to you about a topic that, to be honest, still generates many doubts among users, and that is that many are still not clear about the real speed of their Internet connection, because believe that their 600 Mbps connection is directly equivalent to 600 Mbps. It is an error that occurs quite frequently, and is not always easy to explain.
It’s also something that always makes me smile, as it comes to mind when a friend, a few years ago, told me that he was going to unsubscribe from his ISP because they promised him “30 megabytes” and when he started downloading things it only worked at «3.75 megabytes». I’m sure our more advanced readers will have already realized where the problem was, and that is that my friend assimilated megabits and megabytes as if they were the same thing.
In the example above, your provider was actually delivering what was promised, that is, it was providing you with a 30 Mbps Internet connection, which was fantastic at the time, because those 30 megabits per second equal to 3.75 megabytes per second.
To avoid these errors, the ideal thing would be for Internet connection service providers to stop talking in megabits and start talking in megabytes, but the thing is that the numbers they would handle in your rates would seem much less impressive. Continuing with the example that we have given, it is clear that it sounds worse to offer a 3.75 megabyte connection than a 30 megabit connection, even though both are the same, because the less expert user believes that they are not, and tends to think that « more is better.”
Your actual Internet connection speed does not change, but the unit of measurement does
It is actually a very simple subject, and to illustrate it, a simple analogy suffices. Think of a bottle of water that has a capacity of 100 centiliters. If we wanted to measure in litres, that figure would be reduced to 1 liter. Well, that’s what happens when you go from megabits to megabytes, the figures are reduced because the second is a larger unit of measurement.
Specifically, one megabyte is equal to eight megabits, and the former is the standard unit we use to measure download speed today, hence how popular the term “download at x megs”, or “I have x megs” remains. However, not all “megs” indicate the same value, as we have already said. When you download, for example, a game from Steam, the values you see will be expressed in megabytes, and not in megabits.
So how many megabytes is your Internet connection? To calculate it, you just have to divide the number expressed in megabits by 8. In my case, as I have a 900 Mbps connection, the actual speed expressed in megabytes would be 112.5. For a person who has a 100 Mbps connection, the speed in MBps would be 12.5, and in the case of a 300 Mbps connection, the conversion to MB/s would leave us with a speed of 37.5.
Surprised? Don’t worry, it’s normal, many people are still not clear that a megabit is not the same as a megabyte, but now you are. After converting your connection to megabytes, what result did you get? If you don’t know how to measure it, take a look at this article.
