Bandwidth Speeds Explained
You might wonder why your internet speeds are advertised, and maybe even tested at 25Mb/s, but you only seem to be able to download at a little over 2MB/s at best. I've got the answer, and show you how to figure what download speeds you should be really getting. The short quick and dirty is: it's simply all "lost" in the conversion of units of measure (nothing is actually "lost" other than a big-looking number).
Unit Definitions
Internet speeds are marketed in a unit called "bits". One bit, is one binary digit; the smallest possible unit in a computer. 8 bits is equivalent to one byte, which is the smallest possible unit of usable information (One plain character, such as the letter A, is 1 byte of data).
The Math
You can skip over this part, but it explains the madness.
Example:10Mb = 10,000,000 bitsHere's what's happening:
10,000,000 bits = 10,000,000/8 = 1,250,000 Bytes
1,250,000 Bytes = 1,250,000/1024 = 1,220.70 KB
1,220.70 KB = 1,220.70/1024 = 1.19 MB
10Mb is defined in bits so we convert that to bytes by dividing by 8. Now that we're in bytes, it's important to remember that these units are measured differently (by computers). 1024 bytes make up one kilobyte. 1024 KB make up 1 MB and so on.... So we do that math, and thats how we end up with 1.19 MB maximum transfer speeds on a 10Mb broadband connection. You probably won't get that fast though because of some networking overhead, but you should at least get 1MB in the best conditions.
The formula: Megabits/8388608 = Megabytes
Chart of Speeds
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Feb 11, 2010