So I have been gooning over our latest fiber internet connection, and the speed upgrade we have been recently enjoying. However, while doing a bit of troubleshooting on our Wifi Extender, I realised that the industry had been playing a trick on me for the past 20 years.
The first thing you will learn about in any Computer Science course is that a byte is formed out of eight bits. We don’t really deal with data this small; a word document is a few kilobytes, a large excel a few megabyte, a full length movie a few gigabytes, and your hard drive is probably a terrabyte or two. This keeps going up until you get to the amount of data on the internet, which is estimated at ~180 zettabytes, or a trillion gigabytes.
So when I heard that we had had giga speeds, I assumed we were getting gigabytes. Turns out we were getting giga BITS, or 1/8 of a gigabyte. Still more than fast enough, but I still think its a little sneaky that speed is measured in bits, and storage in bytes.
You could say they have pulled a fast one.
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