Why advertise in Mb, when it should be MB!

I was watching a BBC news article today about the speed of broadband and saw a snipped form this website (which I never knew existed) thinking to myself that yes, there is a problem, but no its not the speed. You see its the way in which its measured that confuses me... who the hell knows what a Megabit (Mb) is??

I don't know anybody who measures a file in Kb or Mb, they all do so in Mb e.g. "its a 2 meg file" i.e. its a 2MB file. So, when ISPs say that the connection is 8Mb, they don't mean MB, they mean its actually 1MB!

How the hell is this allowed to go on?!

ref: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12618350

Storage is measured in Bytes, bandwidth / throughput is measured in bits. Just the way it has always been.

So when an ISP says 8Mb they do indeed mean 8Mbps.

If you are talking about a rate then its Mega bits per second
If its a file size then its Mega Bytes per second.

Do people get confused between pounds and pence?

Because transmission speeds have always been measured in kilobits/second (or before that "baud"), which in the days of 1200kbps maximum made sense.

Data file sizes have always been measured in bytes, as one byte holds one character. To measure it in bits would be meaningless.

You have clearly seen download sites giving you the byte speed. That is because they are dealing in data bytes when carrying out the task of downloading an n-MegaByte file, but for specifying the connection speed of your modem to the exchange that's pointless, as no data bytes are being carried. Just empty packets if you aren't doing anything.

No it isn't, storage is quoted in BIG bold letters on the front of a product in GBs:


http://tinyurl.com/6aepfsz

-or-

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51bmOq1EqfL.jpg

Its always the same, MB and GB, not Mb and Gb. People don't say hmmm lets divide everything by eight! The way it works is if you ask anybody at work or at home how big x file is they'll tell you in MB or GB, never anything else (unless its <MB and then the d/l speed does not matter).

In reply to a post by tide:

No it isn't, storage is quoted in BIG bold letters on the front of a product in GBs:

That's what he said.

People do get confused, all the time, with MB and Mb, I used to work in a call centre for a broadband company and they always got that confused. Its always the same with you tech types, you think everything is so uncomplicated.

People easily get confused, the very news article mentioned that people don't even realise the adverts mean "up to"... how are they going to know what Mb or MB are?! when 1MB is 8Mb, its a joke.

All people know is that the computer says xMB and that's what they measure things in, every day.

In reply to a post by tide:

People do get confused, all the time, with MB and Mb, I used to work in a call centre for a broadband company and they always got that confused. Its always the same with you tech types, you think everything is so uncomplicated.

People easily get confused, the very news article mentioned that people don't even realise the adverts mean "up to"... how are they going to know what Mb or MB are?! when 1MB is 8Mb, its a joke.

All people know is that the computer says xMB and that's what they measure things in, every day.

Really, storage is measured in Bytes and transmission is measured in bits.

So what you want people to do is then understand that 1MB is 8MB, then to do loads of maths when they're downloading a file online which states itself as 25MB.

people are used to GB and MB and expect to download in that same measurement, the old way was dominated by tekkies, not now.

That is what they may have been trying to say but they were seeming to get themselves confused by the end with wrong usage of b and B.

And I don't care if people say MB or Mb they are wrong either way if referring to a speed. Stick to Mbps and avoid confusion.

Edited by gomezz (Wed 02-Mar-11 21:00:21)