I bet.

Surprised that nobody has pointed out that bandwidth has always been measured in cycles/sec, nowadays Hertz, and Hz is roughly parallel to bits/second... roughly equivalent to what used to be baud when I started

Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta... just a convenience when the numbers get too big for convenience.

OMG, can't you see why Apple's simplistic approach reaps rewards.

In reply to a post by tide:

when as technical support you meet face to face with a user you don't dare behave like that. That's the kind of detachment you have from society, what people's needs are.

What makes you think I work as technical support? For one thing, I patently do not possess the necessary people skills as you may have noticed. And for another thing, me is just an 'umble van driver.

nice to see we missed the real problem.

just 3% get close to the advertised speeds and not even 1/3rd get over adsl1 speeds. Thats a severe breach of misselling in my book, "up to" should at least have a majority of people getting close to it.

Hmm, the style is familiar...

No, all advertised speeds on domestic broadband lines are an aproximation due to the nature of the technology used. However there are technologies that give consistent speeds.

My point stands. The bits moved do not equal the bits at either end. The bits moved equal the bits moved. Transfer speeds are thusly measured in bits moved per second (bps) or if lots of bits are being moved kilobits, megabits, or even gigabits moved per second (Kbps, Mbps, or Gbps respectively). The data is stored in chunks (roughly equivalent to characters) known as bytes, these bytes are typically 8 bits, but are not necessarily so. These bytes are discreet chunks (it either fills a byte or is padded to a byte¹) and so file sizes are measured in bytes (B) or if lots of chunks are used possible kibibytes mibibytes or even gibibytes (KiB, MiB or GiB respectively²)

The fact you do not like these facts does not change them!






1:Actually on modern file systems files tend to be stored in blocks, typically of 1024 bytes, and not in bytes per se, but as file sizes are so rarely less than a KiB these days that's not a huge problem.


2:Windows actually misreports file sizes. A file reporting as 10MB in Windows is actually 10MiB but let's not confuse issues further.

Exactly why I prefer the DSLZoneUK speed guesstimator, as it gives a range

I get the bottom of the range, but accept it's within the range expected for my attenuation

NB: Having just checked, http://www.dslzoneuk.net/ appears to be dead at the moment

I understand this is a problem. But my argument is that the speeds we measure in are not understood by the wider public.

In reply to a post by tide:

Lets not talk politics, lets keep Europe out of it please.

All I am saying is that technology moves quickly and the old dial-up is over and we all use MB now.. did you see light peak, that's not going to be measured in kbps is it. Sure its a 10Gbps transfer but the lead tekkie at Intel showed the speed gauge in the demo video at 1:16 explains things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kidmWiqKzqY


Even Intel know people measure in MBps not Gb. Its got to change, we are approaching the multiple MB speed now. If you like, we're going metric, from inches to metres (if your in the UK)

Unfortunately, that clip shows it exactly as we are all saying. Perhaps your attention span didn't last long enough to get to 1:50.

He showed us a file transfer speed being measured in MB per second, (768 or thereabouts?), as most such software does. He then goes on to talk, at 1:50 about the Light Peak speed being 10Gbps bi-directional, with potential to develop to 100Gbps. Also the spec stand shows 10Gbps.

You'd better email him to put him right.