BBC website wrong re data speed units

Linky.

Scroll down to "Quick conversions".

They use 1024 as the multiplier, and don't mention "per second (ps)" .

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Linky.

Scroll down to "Quick conversions".

They use 1024 as the multiplier, and don't mention "per second (ps)" .

Why does it need per second? It might be normal to refer to data speeds using per second but it could equally be per minute or per hour.

Pretty useless article anyway.

"Bell Labs said it used two pairs of 30m (98.4ft)-long standard phone cables to achieve the speed in its laboratory.

It suggested the tech could eventually be adapted to offer 1 Gbps in real-world uses."

Unless they achieve it over a larger distance the experiment is useless. Also it's two pairs - Means probably laying even more copper line plant to be achieved in the real-world. Might as-well lay fibre optic cables.

Experiments like what BT did between the BT Tower and Ipswitch are so much more realistic.

The quality of the wrong speed units match their article quality in my opinion.

As they have said "data speeds" it needs to be per something. The problem is they have no time dimension so it cannot be a speed but it is instead a quantity.

And the article (or at least the conversions part) was probably written by someone who has been in the industry since before the SI units were used for kilobits when the industry standard was 1024 - before the invention of kibibits in 1998.

The computer industry has been using 1024 for kilobit since long before the kibibit came into being. That amount of history is difficult to undo (like getting people to change from imperial to metric).

No 't' in Ipswich.

Eh? There's nowt wrong with their 'Quick conversions'.

They correctly use 1000 as the multiplier of all the 'bit' units which as they say are used in describing speeds; they don't say they are speeds.

The 1024 multiplier is correctly only used for all the 'byte' units used in measuring storage.

In reply to a post by MHC:

Why does it need per second? It might be normal to refer to data speeds using per second but it could equally be per minute or per hour.

Quite. It is normal to use per second. So "Data speeds are usually described in terms of bits" says "usually" but then ignores that.

It is nonsense to talk of a speed of 1024 bits.

Hah!

It does now! Thanks for pointing that out. It has been corrected.

Clearly not as a result of my post, as the ps is still missing.

I read this article and I am sure that the data speed section had units of 1024 the same as the storage section.

I could, of course, be mistaken!

It did for a while.