It doesn’t make sense to state Internet speed in bytes
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
30 June 2013
Ken Irari is baffled by the claims made by an Internet Service Provider. He writes: “I noticed that they advertise their internet connection speeds as being ‘up to 100 MEGABYTES per second’. Normally, internet connection speeds are expressed as MEGABITS per second (Mbps). I'm therefore unsure as to whether the wording in the advert is correct.”
Ken points out correctly that 1 byte = 8 bits and therefore, the advertiser is claiming to offer speeds of up to 800 megabits per second. According to Ken, “this seems implausible for product intended for residential users”.
Now computer data is stored in groups of 8 bits; that is, in bytes. This makes sense because all keyboard characters and computer instructions have been assigned 8-bit codes – the so-called ASCII character set.
Internet connections are made with a single line of cable and the data is transmitted by switching the signal between a low and high state. The speeds quoted are the number of fluctuations per second. These are bits and therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to state the speed in bytes!
Nevertheless, Internet Service Providers do not appear to agree on a standard method of quoting the speeds. Some use bits while others use bytes. To make things even more complicated, the symbols used are also inconsistent: I have seen “kbps”, “KBPS”, “Kbps” and, in a few cases, “kBps”. It leaves the user wondering which is which.
Let us first agree that the “ps” or “PS” at the end stands for “per second”. The correct way of writing it is “/s” but we shall let that pass for now… The bigger problem is the meaning of the “KB”, “kB”, “Kb” and “kb”.
The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) – the international body that regulates the use of symbols - has assigned the lower case “b” to bit and upper case “B” to byte. But to avoid confusion, IEC recommends that the full word, “bit”, be used whenever possible instead of the symbol “b”.
The symbol for kilo is a lower case “k”. Thus kilobits should be written as “kb” and kilbytes as “kB”. But what is the meaning of “kilo”?
In the metric system, kilo is 1,000. 1,000 grams make a kilogram (kg) and 1,000m make a kilometre (km). Therefore, 1kb is 1,000bits and 1kB is 1,000bytes.
But inside a computer, the number1,000 is cumbersome because it cannot be expressed in powers of 2. That is, it doesn’t fall in this series: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,…256, 512, 1,024,… To distinguish between 1,000 and 1,024, many computer experts have adopted the upper case “K” for 1,024 and “k” for 1,000. However, this can confuse scientists and engineers from other specialities because, by IEC rules, the capital letter “K” stands for Kelvin – a unit for measuring temperature.
So, the correct way of stating Internet speed should be kilo bits per second, which is “kb/s”, or “kbit/s”. If the value exceeds 1,000kb/s, then it can be written in megabits per second (Mb/s or Mbit/s); where 1Mb is equivalent to 1,000kb.
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