Comment by yapyap
10 hours ago
I gotta say, I hate it when companies use “xxx bits per second”, whether its Mega or Giga nobody uses bits per second and for the average consumer it’s very unclear that this differs from bytes.
Having to explain to relatives and such that “yeah you actually have to divide that by 8” is a hassle and I get tricked by it subconsciously at times as well.
2 gbps meaning 250 megabytes per second is a SCAM. A marketing sham at it’s finest.
“I have 100 mbps download” meaning “I get 12.5 megabytes download per second” is ridiculous!!
Networking only uses bits/s. Nobody in the networking world talks in bytes/s, and pretty much nobody in the data transfer world does.
The only industry that talks in bytes/s is parts of the storage space, because they relate to files, that are measured in bytes/s. And even them use both: the data link is in bits/s (e.g. SATA 6 is 6Gbps, NVMe uses the same bits/s than PCIe (1)) while the drive is usually in bytes/s (µSD cards, NVMe SSDs, etc).
When you look at the industry at large, throughput is virtually always measured in bits/s. HDMI is in bits/s. Video codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. Audio codecs measures bitrates in bits/s. PCIe is in bits/s (1). Ethernet is measured in bits/s. Wifi is measured in bits/s. You get the picture.
The good thing about keeping it consistent is that values are relatable. Streaming services naturally talk in bitrate for the video quality, and your ISP also talks in bits/s. You can compare the two numbers. Bytes/s is only really useful for on the spot jobs that you do once, like transferring photos from an SD card to your computer. Otherwise, it's just a unit.
(1): ackhstually pcie measures speeds in transfers/s because they include the 8b10b/64b66b encoding overhead and TLP overhead but I digress.
That’s not marketing related at all. It’s how network speeds have been measured long before ISPs were a business.
A byte per second is no more intuitive than a nibble per second or a bit per second. You might be used to byte as a power user because of storage, but I assure you that to regular people “256 gigabytes” is a meaningless number as well.
If you really want to piss people off, use Gibibits - 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bits. The ratio between those and Gigabytes is ~7.451.
I honestly feel mibi and gibibytes per second are the easiest units to rationalise about. The data I am transferring is already known to me in its binary prefix unit. Seconds for that data to transfer is a trivial translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
and how do you feel about HDD vendors (and Apple) using giga-/tera- for their strictly SI power-of-ten and not power-of-two meaning?
This ship sailed out of view a long time ago, the only GB you’ll see that is still base-2 is RAM. And that’s only because you literally can’t address physical RAM in non power-of-2 blocks in most architectures.
Wait until you find out about network endianness.