If you've recently purchased a plan from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), you may have noticed that the company advertises its speeds in megabits or gigabits per second. On the other hand, most mobile or Internet with data caps measure maximum usage in megabytes or gigabytes.
By now you might have thought that these two terms were the same. However, a “bit” and a “byte” are separate units of measurement used for different things. Each byte is made up of eight bits. So, one megabyte equals eight megabits, eight megabytes equals 64 megabits, and so on.
Additionally, their abbreviations are different. You may see a bit as Mb or Mbit, while a byte is referred to as MB. When referring to speed, megabits per second are referred to as “Mbps,” while megabytes per second are referred to as “MB/s.”
Mega, Giga, Tera and more
When measuring data in bits or bytes, it is important to know the following common unit prefixes:
- 1,024 kilobytes = 1 megabyte
- 1,024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte
- 1,024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte
Most hardware is measured in terabytes, while most connection speeds are measured in gigabits.
It's also very handy to know some quick conversions for the numbers used for internet plans. Here are some useful facts for measuring your potential maximum download speed:
- 25 megabits per second = 3.125 megabytes per second
- 100 megabits per second = 12.5 megabytes per second
- 1 gigabit per second = 128 megabytes per second
Remember to always be careful about the bandwidth your internet service provider (ISP) promises. If in doubt, you can do a quick search online tofind out what the average internet speeds are in your area.
