Megabits or Megabytes? — TechKnowSurge

About this interactive

What you are doing: reading a transfer rate, deciding whether it is in megabits or megabytes, and writing it in the other unit. The lesson's point: the same speed shows up in two units. A speed test measures the data stream a bit at a time, so it reports megabits per second, written with a little b (Mbps). A file download in the browser's download history, or a file copied to a network drive, reports megabytes per second, written with a big B (MB/s). One byte is 8 bits, so megabits ÷ 8 = megabytes, and megabytes × 8 = megabits. Two cautions. The overhead the Bits, Nibbles, Bytes and Octets lesson describes means a real download usually shows a little less than the speed test; these questions convert units and do not predict download times. And some programs count a megabyte as 1,024 × 1,024 bytes, the binary prefixes from the Kilo, Mega, Giga lesson; these questions use SI megabytes, as that lesson does. How to use it: look at the b. Little b, divide by 8; big B, multiply by 8. Type a number only.

What you'll learn

Read a transfer rate as megabits per second (Mbps, little b) or megabytes per second (MB/s, big B), as a speed test, a file download and a network copy show it
Convert a rate between Mbps and MB/s with 8 bits to a byte, so two readings can be compared

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+

1.5 Compare and contrast common units of measure.

Key terms

Megabit per second: A data transfer rate equal to one million bits per second, the standard unit for rating broadband internet connections and network interface speeds.
Megabyte: A unit of digital storage equal to one million bytes, commonly used to measure document and image file sizes, RAM amounts, and software installation sizes.
Bit: Short for binary digit, the smallest unit of data in computing, holding a single value of 0 or 1; all digital information is ultimately composed of bits.
Byte: A group of 8 bits; the standard unit for representing a single character or small value in computing, and the building block for larger storage measurements such as kilobytes and gigabytes.

Topics

Megabit Per Second Megabyte Calculation Interactive Calculation

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