What does your Internet Connection Speed mean?

By Bon Talampas on April 25, 2011, 7:55 PHT 15

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Data is the fundamental form in which information and commands are handled by computers and connected peripherals such as hard disks, flash drives etc.

Computers and connected components communicate using binary numbers. A bit is a digit of data, either 0 or 1. One byte requires 8 bits. Every character produced, such as a letter of the alphabet, a punctuation mark or a number, needs 8 binary bits to describe it, or 1 byte of data.

For example:

To view a simple example of this, you can open your notepad and type a single letter and save it. You will then see the byte size of the file you created.

You will notice that a single character consumes 1 byte.  A webpage or a single post in a blog will require a lot of bytes. =)

How about the Speed?

Kbps is an abbreviation for kilobits per second while Mbps is Megabits per second.  It refers to data transfer speeds as measured in kilobits and megabits. The standard home DSL connection speed now ranges from 1Mbps up to 15Mbps.

There are 8,388,608 bits in 1 MB
8 bits in 1 Byte
1024 Bytes 1 KB
1024 KiloBytes 1MB

MegaBytes per second versus Megabits per second

Oftentimes, we mistakenly overlook the difference between MBps and Mbps.

• 1(MBps) MegaByte per second will mean 8,388,608 bits; while

• 1 (Mbps) Megabit per second will mean 1,000,000 bits

There are more than 7 million bits difference equivalent to 901KB.

So how much download speed (in Bytes) you will get in 1 Mbps connection?

Here’s the calculation:

1 Byte = 8 bits

1 Megabit = 1 MegaByte/8

You will have an approximate download speed of 128 KiloBytes per second or 13 to 14 minutes to finish downloading a 100 MB file.