Testing upload/download bandwidth speeds for verification

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 12:42 -0400, Chris Tyler wrote:
> Yes. 3 megaBITs per second is just over 300 kiloBYTEs per second.
> There
> are 8 bits per byte, plus there's packet and protocol overhead, so a
> 10:1 ratio between the numbers is normal.

Actually not. Even discounting protocol overhead, a 3Mbps connection is
3 million (3x10^6) bits per second. 300KB of data is 300 kilobytes
(300x2^10) bytes.

The fact that communications and computer people have different
interpretation of kilo and mega (and giga and ...) is a source of much
confusion. In computing we're supposed to use kebi, mebi etc. (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix) for the powers of 2, but not
many do.

poc