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Comment by namanyayg

21 hours ago

I've never heard bandwidth being expressed in bytes. But if we're being pedantic then I'd like to throw my hat in and call it 62.5kB.

Or even better, 62.5KiB (for kibibyte)

> Or even better, 62.5KiB (for kibibyte)

Well, we can’t know if Starlink’s marketing team used 2^10 or 10^3, and since it’d inflate their numbers I guess the latter.

  • Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no address lines, etc, to push us to powers of 2 (though we may get a few powers of 2 from having a power of 2 number of possible symbols).

    So telco rates which are multiples of 56000 or 64000; baud rates which are multiples of 300; ethernet rates which are mostly just powers of 10; etc etc etc.

    Of course, there's occasional weird stuff, but usually things have a lot of factors of 5 in there and seem more "decimal-ish" than "binary-ish".