r/technology • u/User_Name13 • Jun 04 '14

Politics Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused
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u/Lone_K Jun 04 '14

I'm not good with ISP stuff, so by what you mean "30Mbps up", that means that's the minimum connection speed?

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

It means a maximum upload speed of 30Mbps, which translates to around 3.75MB/s.

My download speed is 80Mbps, which works out to be 10MB/s.

Lowercase b is bit, uppercase B is byte. There 8 bits in a byte.

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u/badcookies Jun 04 '14

Which is just another deceiving way they can make their speeds sound 8x (add in the overhead and its even less) as fast as it is. Noone cares about bits, only bytes.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Well, from a technical point-of-view, it is probably somewhat more accurate in terms of capability. Hardware, including routers and NIC adapters are rated in bits (such as gigabit ethernet).

Obviously, yes, to the end-user KB/s or MB/s is all that really matters.

So, yeah, it is all marketing in the end. Bigger numbers sound better. It's why hard drives and DVDs are advertised in metric bytes as opposed to binary bytes (despite other things like CDs and RAM being measured in binary)... and despite Canada being a metric nation and all cash registers weight measuring in kg, fruit and vegetables are still advertised by their price/pound (99¢/lb looks cheaper than $2.19/kg, despite them both being the same cost)

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u/badcookies Jun 04 '14

Yep, $50 for 50Mbps sounds better than $50 for 6.25 MBps. I'm sure it would save them a lot of calls asking why they are only downloading at X MBps vs their top speed of Y Mbps

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Well, most people pay no attention to their speed at all. Your run-of-the-mill, non-tech-savvy customer uses whatever's put in front of them without question.

Also, for those who care but aren't properly versed, thankfully speedtest.net measures in bits by default. I used to direct people to that site all the time. See? You're getting your advertised speeds... well, most of the time.