megabit vs megabyte; Although megabit and megabyte are similar words, they are actually different units of measurement. In the following, we will use these two units and explain their differences to each other.
megabit vs megabyte
If you’ve been using plans for Internet service providers, you’ve probably noticed that these companies speed up their plans in megabits per second. On the other hand, mobile operators usually measure your maximum usage in terms of megabytes or gigabytes.
Some people think that these two units are the same. However, bits and bytes are distinct units of measurement used for a variety of functions. Each byte consists of 8 bits. So one megabyte equals eight megabits and eight megabytes equals 64 megabits.
Also in English, their abbreviations are different from each other. The abbreviation bit in English is the lowercase letter b (megabits are written as Mb or Mbit) and is used for the byte abbreviation of the capital letter B (megabytes are written as MB). When it comes to speed, megabits per second and megabytes per second are usually in English texts in Mbps and MB / s.
Convert bit to byte
To better illustrate this difference, we use a real-world scenario. Suppose you buy from ADSL Internet Services Company at a speed of 16 Mbps. This means that in the best possible conditions, you can download 2 MB per second. As a result, downloading a 100 MB file takes 50 seconds.
Measurement with bits
As we have said, bits are mainly used by internet service companies and are more commonly referred to as “bit rates”. For many users, the question is why their internet speed is not as fast as promised. This is due to the difference between bandwidth and speed. Your network bandwidth refers to the maximum amount of information it can transmit over a period of time, such as 1 second.
On the other hand, the speed of your network is the actual speed of data exchange from an online server to the system or vice versa. This speed can vary greatly depending on the Internet service provider, type of communication, and location.
Utilizing bytes
Bytes are used for almost everything related to filing size and storage. All forms of storage – from SSDs to cloud storage services – are expressed in byte capacity. Measuring the size of files on your system is also based on bytes.
The reason for using bytes instead of bits to measure file size goes back to early computers. Each bit can have a value of zero or one. When combined, they create a byte that is the smallest amount a computer can read and process. Then in these early computers, each byte was assigned to a text character.
Since then, files have become much more complex, and bytes are now a very small amount to measure. As a result, most files on your computer are at least one kilobyte or 1024 bytes.
Mega, Giga, Tera and more
When measuring data in bits or bytes, you need to know what these frequently used letters actually represent;
- 1024 KB = 1 MB
- 1024 MB = 1 GB
- 1024 GB = 1 terabyte
Also, to buy internet designs, it is better to know how to convert them to see how fast an internet design offers you in the best case in the real world;
- 16 Mbps = Download 2 MB / s
- 8 Mbps = Download 1 MB / s
- 4 Mbps = Download 512 KB / s
Finally, we must remind you that such speeds are best for you, and depending on the situation, you will probably end up with less speed.
