Debate are separate ends of distinct sides of opposing views. Debate is such as to encourage the defaulting of one of those ends, I am not yet ready to concede. I am therefore in the right.

Your arguments are of a past time when computing was measured in bits, not is it in MB, this is called progress with a little help from debate.

Divide by eight WHY?

How many bits in a Byte? You can say eight but there are occurrences where a Byte has a different number.

You also mention fibre optics ... what is the data rate for those? Whatever it is, it is in Megabits or Gigabits per second.

I think my state of mind is quite sound, my persona quite flat-line. You feel compassion to yourself, of all the nerve, still I do not think anything more from you will help this debate.

In reply to a post by tide:

its like measuring a building in mm.

The standard unit for drawings of buildings (and ships) is millimetres.

To put in my pennyworth or 0.01 poundsworth, whichever units your comfortable with, after giving up reading this repetitive thread ...

It's always been that computer storage is measured in Bytes (B) but communications/transmissions are measured in bits (b).

This is because on a communication link the data travels in bits serially, one after the other, whereas in a computer the data is stored, in memory, on a disk or in the processor, in Bytes of (usually) 8 bits and these bytes are moved around the computer in parallel on 8 "wires" (or more). Also in the computer, the Byte is the smallest unit that can be addressed individually. That's bit like someone can send a letter to your house but can't address it to your kitchen and have to P.O. deliver it there .

Another point that you are confused with is when you download a 100 MByte file (as it ends up on your PC), you are actually transmitting more than 800 Mbits between the server and your PC; perhaps as much as 900 - 1000 Mbits and the speed needs to account for that. This is because there are various overheads in the transmission, like carrying the source & destination IP addys, breaking it up into packets, carrying checksums and other error correction ...

In reply to a post by tide:

, still I do not think anything more from you will help this debate.

Nor you.

In reply to a post by tide:

I think my state of mind is quite sound, my persona quite flat-line. You feel compassion to yourself, of all the nerve, still I do not think anything more from you will help this debate.

More confirmation.

Fibre optics are limitless in terms of considered data rates for domestic use, this is all about advertising for domestic use and so advertising would simply be diverted to the media services which came with the service itself. But before fibre optics will come the need for easier to understand speeds, which people can understand.

Companies have tried to measure things like MP3 album downloads, but that's going to be even less accurate than plain old MB (not that Mb right now is accurate). However if turning to a work colleague, in any environment but a technical one, the response will be a number like 12.7 then "m" and "b", some will know it to be Megabyte and some will probably think its Megabit etc... but essentially they will know a file is, so big, and then associate the advertised speeds with those.

Face it, no one really knows what Mb is in the real world and why its being advertised I do not know.

Oddly enough I did know that. But it doesn't matter how many zeros you place on the end, its only what everybody else has been saying and its no exception to the "It's always been" dogma which I ma battling against.

It has to change, because files are bigger now, the measurement has to catch up. Like I said nobody measures a house in mm (not that they ever did) but one doesn't.

I knew you'd pick up on that.

Its per component.