Well I could argue your distracting from the question posed by the title of this thread and the majority of the posts relating to it (except of course those that digress).

I agree accuracy, which is best served by honesty, in real world speeds is a must but that people will not know what those mean without understanding what a Mb is.

Ask the nest person you meet on the bus, the one you are sitting next to, give them multiple choice like how much is an average MP3 made up of 10Mb, 6MB or 10Gb and you'll see they don't even know and if they get it right then why not measure in MB then?!

Fat chance, I do have a life, no virtual friends might be my weakness if its a challenge to keep my "online" indicator on.

My arguments continue to tan the competition even in my absence!

Don't be silly, if you connection is at 4MB (and guaranteed at that speed), then 32MB isn't going to take very long is it... 4, 8, 12, 16, 32... that's about 5sec!

When your talking about GB, well, that always takes a long time, but to know the MB is best. Were not going faster than that right now so there's no good in measuring in GB just yet, although fibre optics will provide that - in the future.

Its so simple!

About the second only worthy post (bar my own) on this thread contributing to the argument for the present status quo. Yes there is ignorance, but technology evolves to fast to keep with with the facts of those changes, compression will improve (but is generally not as important now because of broadband and storage costs) but the constant will demand the most attention.

There is a constant I'd argue, that is MB in terms of how big a song is: Its different for everybody of course, for me its about 26MB as song (lossless) but others will be less, yet everybody is familiar with the initials "MB" while its the wording "meg" which confuses (oh and the small "b").

The situation is never going to come about that people realise the small version of the "B", maybe after they bought the service, but not before I bet you... that's a large proportion of the population. What of the ones who do, then they have to constantly divide or multiply by eight in order to fully understand what they get... a 32Mb line, well that's divided by eight, which is 4MB, well why not just say.

Groan.

Don't hijack a threat with Christmas cracker humour please!

In reply to a post by tide:

Please stay on course thank you.

So you are not a bit fan of thread-drift, which tends to happen sooner rather than later when the original topic has been beaten to a pulp iin fairly short order?

MBytes per what ?

MB per what, though ?

MaxDSL will do about 700 kBytes/s or 2.5 GB/hour or 42 MB/min

4MB and 32MB two figures with the same units - do you not get it, how does the average person know you are talking about a file size or a data rate?

GB sorry but the average usage per month is in the 15GB range already

(see which one they place in brackets!)

Bytes. The one you're advocating ?

Presumably for the benefit of the hard of thinking who don't know what the M prefix represents.