Sixteen megabytes!

[Steve]

I'm sure a few of you know this already, but here goes...

I was watching a Sky Broadband ad on Sky Three (Freeview, woo) earlier. The voiceover proclaimed blistering speeds of some "sixteen megabytes" with Sky Broadband. That's a whopping 134 megabits per second, unless they mean megabytes per minute, which ain't so good.

Now, I was going to point out this slight hitch to someone or other, but figured swarms of others will have done so already.

Still, make me chuckle. Would be better still if they actually provided it.

[dave87]

Perhaps its 16mb? as in Megabits - rather than any extended amount of time...

[Whiternoise]

sounds more likely, i can't imagine even sky doling out 130mb broadband just yet - that's like.. large corporation standard

[Matt1eD]

That's was max downloads a month

[Howard]

You know what? I saw that exact ad, and thought EXACTLY the same thing! I even mentioned it to my dad! 16 megabytes, blimey

I guess their marketing company needs a lesson between bits and bytes.


Or maybe Steve just wishes they said sixteen mibibytes

[UKMuFFiN]

What sort of 'fair usage' comes with that? Would be used up within five mins...

[Kumagoro]

marketing ploy?

[MadduckUK]

it would only attract those who know what the hell a megabyte is, and the majority of them SHOULD know that connection will not be 16MB per second......

[my new pc is a]

More like stupidity, surly?

[Steve]

Perhaps its 16mb? as in Megabits - rather than any extended amount of time...

That is what they meant, of course.

However, the person that wrote down the speed of the Internet connection failed to be specific enough, so that once it got to the person doing the voiceover for the ad... it said the wrong thing.

Of course, everybody knows what they really meant, except for those that don't and wouldn't know the difference anyway.

Still, amusing.

[Funkstar]

Of course, everybody knows what they really meant, except for those that don't and wouldn't know the difference anyway.

I think you've hit the nail on the head there

[Stigggeh]

SIXTEEN JIGAWATTS!!!!!

[pollaxe]

Out of interest I typed in my phone number on the Sky site to see what kind of speeds they reckon I could get and I got "Up to 8 mbs" (can't remember if it was megabits or megabytes, sorry) but it amused me because all I can get is 512 kbps on the line and that's pretty unreliable too!

[kidzer]

You know what? I saw that exact ad, and thought EXACTLY the same thing!

Ditto, silly person that wrote the advert

[Taz]

One a related note, do people still use the correct notation for megabytes (MB), megabits (Mb), megabits per second (Mb/S) and so on. I very rarely see the units correctly specified in adverts.

Are the units specified differently these days (compared to when I read Computer Science in the mid-80's)?

[EvilWeevil]

What about kibi, mebi etc to distinguish mulitples of 1024/ powers of 2 rather than kilo, mega etc which technically are multiples of 1000/powers of 10