Re:People Had to Be Convinced of the Usefulness of Electricity
by wruza on Sunday March 19, 2023 @10:22PM
(#35226490)
I don’t get why my comment caused this. No one would think of millibytes per second in that context, and the 4% difference between mebi and mega plays no role here either. I don’t even know if my meters are binary or decimal and am curious where this assumption comes from.
Download speeds can, and should, be measured in computer-oriented mebibytes per second, rather than bits per second, because you are, after all, transferring files. (And yeah, disk space is often measured in powers of ten...) Your ISP's data cap is undoubtedly measured in gibibytes or tebibytes (even though they call them gigabytes or terabytes, that's what the units mean.)
So when you run speedtest.net or Ookla or whatever, you're measuring the actual throughput that the computer's network interface can squeeze through the narrowest straw in your link to the server. That is necessarily a touch lower than the lowest signaling rate of whatever equipment is in-between. Internet connections are sold by trumpeting signaling rates, but those are NOT download nor upload speeds. Never confuse them, because they are overly-optimistic estimates of your maximum throughput (which is infeasible given most PHY and link-layer frame designs.)