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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)

One might ask, wait, isn't that confusing because both bits and bytes start with a b? Yes. YES IT IS. To distinguish, the world generally does MB/s to indicate MegaBytes per second, and Mbps to indicate MegaBits per second. Isn't that fun.

mr mega, you are in for it

How many bytes in a mega byte though.. lol

Yeah, it ough to be 1,000,000 but it's actually not.

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,

because fractional bytes are not a reasonable increment of data. Sure, it does make some things *seem* annoying once you have the ~luxury~ of TCP to rely on. There’s a reason bit rates are only coin of the realm down at the interface level and below. But, uhhh…

Back when I started in the business, the computer industry didn't universally agree that 8 bits was a byte, much less that a word was a multiple of the character size. (And on the first computer I used, the bit rate was "how fast can you carry punch cards to the printer with the 48-letter charset.")

_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.