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Sending Bits

Network data transfer speeds are measured in either megabits per second or megabytes per second depending on the context, and knowing the difference is essential for interpreting real-world performance accurately.

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About this video

Understanding how data transfer speeds are measured is a foundational skill for anyone working in IT. Network speed tests, such as those run directly through Google or dedicated tools like Speedtest.net, report throughput in megabits per second, using a lowercase b to denote bits. This unit reflects the raw capacity of a network connection and is the standard used by internet service providers and network diagnostic tools. When dealing with file transfers, the unit of measurement shifts. Browser download managers and operating system file copy dialogs report speed in megabytes per second, indicated by an uppercase B. Because one byte equals eight bits, a connection speed of 153 megabits per second translates to roughly 19 megabytes per second of usable file transfer speed. The same megabytes-per-second unit appears whether a file is being downloaded from the internet or copied across a local network drive. Being able to distinguish between these two units and convert between them accurately is critical when troubleshooting performance issues, validating service level agreements, or communicating findings to stakeholders. Misreading a lowercase b as an uppercase B is a common source of confusion and can lead to significant errors in performance analysis.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Data Transfer Speeds

Aligned to

CompTIA Tech+
1.5 Compare and contrast common units of measure.
CompTIA A+ Core 1
2.7 Compare and contrast Internet connection types, network types, and their features.

Key terms

Bandwidth
The maximum rate of data transfer across a network path, typically measured in bits per second.
Megabit per second
Mbps
A data transfer rate equal to one million bits per second, the standard unit for rating broadband internet connections and network interface speeds.
Megabit per second
Mbps
A data transfer rate equal to one million bits per second, the standard unit for rating broadband internet connections and network interface speeds.
Latency
The time delay between sending a request and receiving a response over a network.

Topics

Networking Data Transfer Network Speed Bits And Bytes Bandwidth Mbps

Transcript

Running a Speed Test

I wanted to show you a couple of different ways that we transfer and measure data speeds.

I have my browser here, and the first thing I'm going to do is just show you a simple speed test. So I'm going to type in "speed test" and hit enter. Google's nice because they do the speed test right at the beginning, at the front. It used to always do the uas site, and I still do that occasionally, but we can run a speed test right from Google.

Here we see it's saying it is megabits per second. So there it is, there's our measurement — it's in megabits, so it's measuring it by the bits, one bit at a time. Now that's completed, and it's 153 megabits per second, little b, for the download, and 23.9 megabits per second upload.

Downloading a File

Now let's get into a file download. So I can go and just say large file download, and there is a test file site that we will use. We'll just get a large file and we'll download it and see what happens here.

So I'm going to say download, and it's going to say where, and we'll just download it to there. Now the process of downloading it has begun. What I'm going to do now is take a look at this, and I'm just going to click on the full download history, and we can see it's in the process of downloading it. But what's interesting about this is that this is now megabytes per second. So when we're downloading a file, now we get a measurement of megabytes per second, since we're dealing with a file here. So that's handy to have.

Copying a File to a Network Drive

Here's one other example. I'm just copying a file to a network drive, and so this is showing me that the speed of it is in megabytes per second. So here's another example where we see a big B here, megabytes per second.

So there's just a few different ways that it's representing this data. This one is copying a file, so it seems like when we're copying files we're measuring it in megabytes per second.

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