The Difference Between A Megabyte and a Megabit

Byte off things Bit by Bit

Technical jargon is confusing to most, and like electrical measurement systems terms inadvertently get misused thanks to their very similar sounding units and abbreviations.

Case in point, MB and Mb.

When it comes to Megabytes (MB) and Megabits (Mb), most people take them to mean the same or use them interchangeably. Often when someone tells you that they have a internet download speed of 5 Mb/s you feel like “wow that’s a lot, 5 Megabytes a second!” But that’s not really true, as the Mb in the 5 Mb/s stands for Megabits and not Megabytes.

Now that we see there is a difference between the two, lets dive in and learn a bit more:

Bytes

When you say MB you mean Megabytes which in the mobile industry is used to quantify memory, be in internal or external.
Memory is measured in bytes, and is usually denoted by MB (Megabyte), GB (Gigabyte) or TB (Terabyte).
So your phone could have a 16 GB internal memory and an external memory of 64 GB via a microSD card.

Bits

When you say Mbps you mean Megabits per second, which in the mobile industry is used to quantify data transmission speeds; for example your phone Wi-Fi download and upload speeds. Data transmission speeds are usually denoted by kbps (Kilobits per second) or Mbps (Megabits per second). New technology is pushing the limits and Gbps (Gigabits per second) is also making an appearance in the industry.

Though both bits and bytes are used to represent different aspects in the mobile world, they are actually related to each other. Here’s how — one byte is equal to eight bits.
This basically means a bit is eight times smaller than a byte. So the same content that would take 40 minutes to download on a 12 Mbps connection would take just 5 minutes to download on a 12 MBps connection if Megabytes was the gauging unit!

There’s no doubting the fact that this prevalent ambiguity in the two terms works in the favour of the telcos, when much to their delight we as customers take bits to mean bytes!

Don’t you just love Chip-Monks! We’ll help you unravel more stuff in the coming days.

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Originally published at Chip-Monks.