Before trying to understand how to read internet speeds, the first thing you should do is understand how the internet actually works, since you probably use the internet everyday, it would be helpful to understand the basics of that technology. I have a simple video explaining that and it can be found here.
Throughout this article I’ll refer to internet service providers as ISP for short.
Let’s start with some numbers. These numbers will represent the internet service speed, some examples are 25Mbps, 50Mbps, 100Mbps, 500Mbps or 1Gbps. These numbers represent the theoretical maximum internet speed you can achieve. That’s right, you’re not guaranteed to ever reach your maximum advertised speed, especially if you have cable internet like I have. I explain the good and bad of cable internet, DSL, fiber optic, 56K dialup and satellite internet services in a video, you can find it here.
Going back to our topic. Taking 10Mbps as a starting point, this is read as 10 megabits per second. That is NOT the same as 10 megabytes. Megabits is used when you’re referring to the speed at which data is being transferred, such as internet speeds or over your internal network like your home WiFi network. For example my internet speed is 150Mbps. Megabytes is used when you’re talking about how much storage is used up. For example my pictures are 4MB in size or my home video is 2GB in size.
If you ever see either one written down, megabits which is used when discussing the speed of data transfer, it’s typically written as capital M and lowercase b. It’s then written as Mbps (megabits per second).
Megabytes which refers to a file or storage size is written with capital M and B. So when you’re looking at the size of a file, it’ll be MB (or even GB for gigabyte, TB for terabyte and so on).
Now let’s dive into megabits vs megabytes. There’s 8 bits in a single byte. It’s incredibly important to know the difference between mb and MB. This is where a lot of people get mb and MB confused, which is an honest common mistake.
Let’s see how this works for internet speeds. Now that you know 8 bits make one byte, whenever you’re reading internet speeds, just divide by 8. For example, ISPs will show internet speeds noted as 100Mbps, this doesn’t mean you can download a 100MB file within a second. If you convert your 100Mbps to MB, it turns into about 12.5MBps (100/8=12.5). Now divide 100MB by 12.5, that means it would take you 8 seconds to download that 100MB file.
Another example, if your internet speed is 500Mbps and you want to download a 900MB file, 500Mbps doesn’t mean you’ll download it within two seconds. 500Mbps converts into about 62.5MBps (500/8=62.5). Now divide 900MB by 62.5, which means it would take you about 14.4 seconds to download the 900MB file. That’s why some people think if you have a 500Mbps connection and they want to download a game that is say 30GB in size, they think they’ll download it within seconds, when in reality it’ll take several minutes.
Some people might think that ISP providers put Mbps because it displays larger numbers than it would MBps for marketing purposes. If people see larger numbers, then they are more likely to buy their service. This might be true for some providers but remember that when discussing data transfer speed, Mbps has been used in the IT industry for a very long time. Back in the day when you could only transfer bits per second, yup even before humans could transfer kilobits (Kbps). In that sense, ISPs are just following correct terminology.
And now my friends you know how to read and understand advertised internet speeds. It’s not complicated but it can be confusing, until hopefully now that I’ve helped you.
