Bandwidth Converter

Bandwidth is the rate at which data moves, measured at its most basic in bits per second (bps). The whole topic is haunted by one distinction that confuses almost everyone: bits versus bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte, and that factor of 8 is behind a lot of frustration.

Bit-based units (how connections are sold):

• 1 Kbps = 1,000 bps
• 1 Mbps = 1,000,000 bps
• 1 Gbps = 1,000,000,000 bps

Byte-based units (how downloads are shown):

• 1 B/s = 8 bps
• 1 MB/s = 8,000,000 bps

Real-world speeds:

• 4G LTE: 10–50 Mbps
• 5G: 100–1,000 Mbps
• Gigabit Ethernet: 1 Gbps (about 125 MB/s)

Here’s where people feel cheated. Internet providers advertise bandwidth in megabits per second (Mbps), but your download manager reports megabytes per second (MB/s). Divide the megabit figure by 8 to get the megabyte figure. A 100 Mbps connection tops out near 12.5 MB/s, so a file pulling down at “12 MB/s” on a 100 Mbps line is running at full speed, not a quarter of it.

It isn’t a scam, just two units measuring the same pipe. Once the divide-by-8 becomes second nature, the gap between the number you pay for and the number you watch on screen stops being a mystery.

A second layer of the same confusion: 1,000 versus 1,024. Everything on this page is decimal, so a kilobyte here is 1,000 bytes and a megabyte is 1,000,000. That is the correct convention for data rates and it is what network hardware, ISPs and standards bodies all use. Storage is where it splits: Windows reports file sizes in units of 1,024, so a “1 GB” file shows as 0.93 GB, and the strictly correct name for the 1,024-based unit is the gibibyte (GiB). Between the bits-versus-bytes factor of 8 and the 1,000-versus-1,024 factor of about 1.07, there is roughly 8.6x between the number on your internet bill and a download figure measured the binary way. Neither number is wrong; they are just different units wearing similar names.