Bits and bytes are the most popular terms when it comes to computer and internet. There is always confusion between the terms internet bandwidth, download speed and file transfer rate in computers. Let us first know the difference between bits and bytes.
It is the basic unit if data which can be represented by a computer.1 bit = 0.125 bytes.
b-bit
B-byte
Kilo Bytes/Mega Bytes/ Giga Bytes(KB/MB/GB) represents the size of the data stored. To be more specific, it’s just the size of the file stored in the computer. We use the term KB/MB/GB (uppercase) terms when we converse something about storage space. E.g. A movie with size of 500MB or 1GB .
Consider a situation where you copy a file of size 100MB from one drive to another. In this case, the transfer rate is measured in terms of MB/second. For example, if the transfer rate in 10Mega Bytes/second(10MB/second), then it takes 10 seconds to copy the whole file. Note that we are using uppercase terms here to refer the data transfer rate between storage devices of the computer.
Consider you have an internet connection with speed of 1mbps(megabits per second-lowercase letters) which is equal to 1024kbps. To calculate the download speed:
OR
Download Speed(in KB/second) = kbps value * 8
In our case, the download speed comes to 125kB/second.
Bandwidth | Download Speed (Average Speed) |
---|---|
256 kbps | 32 KBps |
512 kbps | 64 KBps |
1 mbps (1024kbps ) | 128 KBps |