8 bits in a Byte

[Perfectionist]

Nothing particularly wrong with the "upto" notation because its difficult for any adsl company to predict what actual speeds you will achieve with there being so many factors and some totally out of their control.

Eh, I dunno, the prevalence of that term's annoying sometimes. I visited a friend in hospital a few days ago and even in the little cafe/food shops there they're doing this (think it was outsourced to a private comp), well the other term which is just the other end of the scale "from £whatever" - where the "from" price is water, and the rest are like £4 more expensive.

theres nothing wrong with the terminology...

Bits per second for communications...
Bytes for storage...


bits are a little b

bytes are a big B

The average person does not know that though. It's like if food ingredients were allowed to be listed in the kind of terminology used on stuff like shampoos - Latin and proper scientific chemical names etc. It's not, for hopefully obvious reasons.

There's no logical reason for it to be measured in bits per second though, other than the cop-out "traditional" argument "it's always been that way". Today's speeds don't need to be measured by such a small unit.

Exactly!.. Hence the k/m/g/t/etc prefixes.

Hardly, it's a very clunky awkward way to measure things, megabytes would make much more sense. It's like using standard form (scientific number notation a x b to the power of x (no superscript BBcode)) for a number that really isn't that big or small to need it.

[aidanjt]

Hardly, it's a very clunky awkward way to measure things, megabytes would make much more sense. It's like using standard form (scientific number notation a x b to the power of x (no superscript BBcode)) for a number that really isn't that big or small to need it.

How's it clunky or awkward? It's just has a different base.

[Perfectionist]

a tiny tiny base unit that is never realistically used by modern day users... add to that that you need to multiply by 8 to get 1 byte rather than the usual by metric scales of 1000s (bytes kilobytes gigabytes)... it's just pointless. Even 1 letter is 8 bits, no one ever uses bits in everyday computing so it's wrong to market broadband speeds in (mega)bits, it should be megabytes.

[aidanjt]

What?.. Megabits and megabytes have the same base. It's just that megabytes are grouped into 8 bits. Data transmission requires bit resolution because they aren't always byte aligned.

[jamin]

Never byte off a bigger bit than you can chew......

[Perfectionist]

The average user doesn't care about a bunch of decimal points (maybe 1 or 2), just the speed in megabytes...

I give up, it's obvious you aren't going to change your mind, got the whole elitist "our way is better" mindset going on - resistant to change. The average broadband buyer does not care about the fiddly details.

[aidanjt]

The average user doesn't care about a bunch of decimal points (maybe 1 or 2), just the speed in megabytes...

I give up, it's obvious you aren't going to change your mind, got the whole elitist "our way is better" mindset going on - resistant to change. The average broadband buyer does not care about the fiddly details.

It's not a matter of being 'better', it's a matter of being correct and accurate.

[TAKTAK]

Hardly, it's a very clunky awkward way to measure things, megabytes would make much more sense. It's like using standard form (scientific number notation a x b to the power of x (no superscript BBcode)) for a number that really isn't that big or small to need it.

Actually... bytes are clunkier to measure in because if you don't have a full byte (we'll just stick with the accepted 8 bits ) then you would have to go into decimal places, say you had 7 bits per second that would be 7bps but it would be 8/7Bps, measuring in bits per second is an easier solution (due to the ease of implementation) than measuring communications in bytes per second.

The amount of different communication methods is vast (ish ) and alot of them only send a few bits at a time, so measuring them in bits per second makes alot more sense than measuring it in bytes per second.

The unit (is it classed as SI?) has to apply to the full spectrum of communications, not just certain areas because some people feel that it is best for the populous.

It would be much easier for the general populous to actually read what they are signing up to, Broadband is in no way mis-sold!

There is no way for the ISP to give firm details on what speed you would achieve, the only way you can calculate that is by running the service as there are hidden factors that come into play (such as internal wiring) so upto 8Mbps is an accurate description, the maximum you can have on the line is 8Mbps so your achievable throughput is upto 8Mbps...

No deception... it is clearly laid out in T&C's which if people could be arsed to read would reduce alot of the pathetic complaints of 'mis-advertising'.

[aidanjt]

Actually... bytes are clunkier to measure in because if you don't have a full byte (we'll just stick with the accepted 8 bits ) then you would have to go into decimal places, say you had 7 bits per second that would be 7bps but it would be 8/7Bps, measuring in bits per second is an easier solution (due to the ease of implementation) than measuring communications in bytes per second.

The amount of different communication methods is vast (ish ) and alot of them only send a few bits at a time, so measuring them in bits per second makes alot more sense than measuring it in bytes per second.

The unit (is it classed as SI?) has to apply to the full spectrum of communications, not just certain areas because some people feel that it is best for the populous.

It would be much easier for the general populous to actually read what they are signing up to, Broadband is in no way mis-sold!

There is no way for the ISP to give firm details on what speed you would achieve, the only way you can calculate that is by running the service as there are hidden factors that come into play (such as internal wiring) so upto 8Mbps is an accurate description, the maximum you can have on the line is 8Mbps so your achievable throughput is upto 8Mbps...

No deception... it is clearly laid out in T&C's which if people could be arsed to read would reduce alot of the pathetic complaints of 'mis-advertising'.

Which is clearly explained in the wiki link I posted earlier (Hell, even the quick IEC/SI data measurement table I cited in the same post).

[awm]

This should explain it:

[TAKTAK]

Which is clearly explained in the wiki link I posted earlier (Hell, even the quick IEC/SI data measurement table I cited in the same post).

It was indeedy, but the 'they should advertise in bytes' was still going strong

[peterb]

There's no logical reason for it to be measured in bits per second though, other than the cop-out "traditional" argument "it's always been that way". Today's speeds don't need to be measured by such a small unit.

The traditional method and unit of communications speed is the baud (pronounced boad) which refers to the sysmbol rate of a communication path. Bit rate is arguably more useful in data communivcations, although that doesn't in itself differentiate between 'useful' thoughput and overhead.

[Steve]

The traditional method and unit of communications speed is the baud (pronounced boad) which refers to the sysmbol rate of a communication path. Bit rate is arguably more useful in data communivcations, although that doesn't in itself differentiate between 'useful' thoughput and overhead.

Yeah peterb's right. When you're dealing with comms, you're dealing with bitrates and symbol rates.

But even if we do make the translation between bits and bytes, and say somebody has an xMByte/s service, that's still not much more useful, even if it is slightly less confusing. As peter mentions, you still have the problem of overhead. You've got the TCP packet, the encapsulation down the line (ATM), anything higher up (HTTP/SIP/etc).

Basically, unless you're doing engineering calculations, all you need to know is that one is faster than the other, and rougly what that equates to in terms of the time it'll take you to do what you want.

Oh, and on the subject of bytes and words, a word is often tied to the register width of the underlying computer architecture, so a 32-bit system has 4-byte words, and 8-byte double words. A sextibyte is a 6-byte word - I like those.

We can argue the historical differences, but that's what has now 'settled in' as de facto, and I would assume defined in a standard somewhere (at least I hope).

[jamin]

The traditional method and unit of communications speed is the baud (pronounced boad) which refers to the sysmbol rate of a communication path. Bit rate is arguably more useful in data communivcations, although that doesn't in itself differentiate between 'useful' thoughput and overhead.

Amen.....

[jazw]

The traditional method and unit of communications speed is the baud (pronounced boad) which refers to the sysmbol rate of a communication path. Bit rate is arguably more useful in data communivcations, although that doesn't in itself differentiate between 'useful' thoughput and overhead.

That's what we were taught on my degree course (Electronic Engineering). I can see that ISPs are using it on purpose to attempt to confuse the general public, most of whom that I know do not realise that the B is lower case and is referring to individual bits and not bytes. In marketing terms using bytes would mean advertised speeds would be lower and thus sound less impressive. That's how I see the bits/bytes argument. Why should they change what the public are falling for?

[KowShak]

By convention a byte is 8 bits (from when 8 bit computing was normal - 16 bits is a double byte (8 bit processors tended to have 16 bit wide address busses) and 32 bits was a word.

I've not heard the term "double byte" used to refer to two bytes, I'd call two bytes a "short" but that is within a specific context.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(PROT.10).aspx

A word is not always 32 bits, conventions vary from CPU to CPU, from OS to OS and from API to API.

http://foldoc.org/?query=word

If you read the definition of a word from the link above, you may well wonder why the Microsoft site says an WORD is 16 bits on a 32/64 bit architechture such as x86/x64. Gotta love backward compatability.