The truth behind Internet Speed

Published On : 16th July, 2018

You might sometime wonder, that why your operator promises a speed of 5 Mbps, but you instead receive a max speed of 625 KBps. hmmm? And you end up calling your operator to complain about the same! But wait, you are totally wrong. They are actually giving you 5 Mbps speed. Here is the trick. Have you noticed something in 5 Mbps, its Mbps, the M is capital and b is small, that means its Mega Bits Per Second, and in 625 KBps, both K and B are capital, i.e. Kilo Bytes Per Second.

In internet world, the unit of speed is bps or Bits Per Second but in non internet world, such as copying a file or disk speeds, its Bps or Bytes Per Second.
 For ex. you are taking a new internet connection of 60 Mbps bandwidth, then you might think that, "I can download a 60 MB file in just a second :D ". Ah, no, a big NOO. Let me explain!

1 Mbps = 125 KBps or 0.125 MBps

So, to find out the actual speed you will receive in real world, you have to do a simple calculation

1 Mbps  ÷  8 (Bits) = 125 KBps or 0.125 MBps

Where, 8 Bits = 1 Byte, we are dividing 1 Mbps by 8 bits to get it in bytes.

So, for 60 Mbps,

60 Mbps  ÷  8 (Bits) = 7.5 MBps

Here, 7.5 MBps means you can download a 7.5 MB file in a second on your 60 Mbps internet speed.

Don't get confused, just divide your internet's speed by 8 to get the real world speed.

For Bps to bps:

However, to find out the internet world speed from your download section or real world speed, just multiply it by 8

Ex. - 5 MBps x 8 (Bits) = 40 Mbps

Do you know, in most of the CS job interviews, interviewees fail in this simple question/calculation. 

In the case of disk speed, its always in Bps i.e. Bytes per second, such as MBps, GBps and that won't need any calculation.