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Whoever decided to use "bits per second" instead of "bytes per second" is my sworn enemy

If you ever see something like "100 Mbps internet" and thought to yourself "100 megabytes per second" congratulations you have been hoodwinked It's actually 12.5 megabytes per second

100 Mbps almost always is MegaBITs per second. You have to divide by 8 (8 bits in a byte)

The responsible party deserves a karate chop

mr mega, you are in for it

How many bytes in a mega byte though.. lol

Yes hi hello, greetings from the world of networking! I realize your character stream is nice and all, but in the context of an actual conduit, they are utterly nonsensical. Signals travel in discrete segments, and here, symbol rate and bit rate and character rate are all different things.

When you’re the dude figuring out how to shove shit over the wire, or over the air, shit like 16-QAM signaling (3 bits per symbol), 8-into-14 encoding (a form of forward error correction), TPC, and a shit load of other line-level encoding techniques make the bit the only sensible increment,

_MiB has entered the chat_

Byte doesn’t mean 8 bits. Having used systems with non 8 bit bytes. Octet does mean 8 bits. A bigger issue is that not all protocols result in an octet per second. Some are even fractional bits per second. It’s more accurate to say bits per second. For one thing it avoids 1000 v 1024.

If you think this is bad look into the difference between MegaBytes and MebiBytes. 1000 Kilobytes != 1024 Kilobytes And it compounds on each, kilo, mega, giga, tera, each is further off and further off.

Weren't mebibytes just invented because of marketing bullshit so they could sell smaller drives and no one knew how to divide large numbers by 8?

You've sorta got cause and effect mixed up. Marketing bullshit called 1000 Kilobytes a Megabyte even though it isn't. People then invented "Kibibyte" as a way to make that clear. They knew how to divide by 8 they didn't on purpose to sell more drives.

You know, I learned this a while back but never asked the follow-up question: what is the purpose of a bit as opposed to bytes?

I assume it's some historic nonsense

Older networking frames sometimes used non-bit length headers. UGH. (Also 300 baud is 37.5 bytes/sec... so umm, yeah. And I've used a 300 baud modem.)

It's historic non-nonsense. Before Intel took over the CPU world a byte could be anything from 5 to 9 bits. Standards docs said "octet" rather than "byte" to mean something that's always 8 bits. Bits-per-second was the only way to get a number that everyone understood

yep, early data transfer rates were measured in bauds (arbitrary “symbols per second”, named after the telegraphic Baudot code) — in a binary system where there are only 2 symbols, it is equivalent to bits per second obviously modern data transmission is far more complex but guess it stuck

I assume it’s marketing nonsense to make ISP advertised speeds seem faster ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

like the USB-A connector that looks indistinguishable right side up vs wrong side down logan until u try to force it in i am sure there was an engineer reason

Bytes weren't always 8 bits, in the distant past, so bytes per second wasn't very useful. In fact we used to use baud rate for transmission speed, but bps is easier.

you transfer bits over a serial connection, you store bytes at the other end

I guess my question is: what breaks if info storage and transfer were measured in units of equal size?