Broadband speed...?

flyinfishmonkey

Hi everybody. Just a quick question that I hope someone here can answer cos I'm not sure that the "nice" people at Eircom answered me correctly.
I have broadband and if downloading a 5MB file, for instance, how long should it take? Surely if I was getting 512 Kbps (which they have told me I should be getting) it should download in 10 seconds (Is 512 Kbps not a half a megabyte)...? If so, is there a difference between "KBps" and "Kbps"? It is taking about 4/5 mins for a file this size to download but when I rang Eircom I was told that 60 KBps was easily as fast as 512Kbps and not even them in Eircom got the speed I was getting... Yeah right...!! Answers on a postcard lol

Moriarty

512kbit/sec == 64kbyte/sec.

512kilobits per second == 64kilobytes per second.

8 bits in a byte.

512 divided by 64 = 8

Bandwidth (the size of the connection) is conventionally measured in kilobits, while everything else speed related is generally measured in kilobytes.

So eircom were right.

<edit>
Kbps == kilobits per second
KBps == kilobytes per second (large B, for the larger size)
</edit>

flyinfishmonkey

Thank you sir. Point cleared up and appreciated.

vibe666

might be worth considering getting DU Meter from THESE NICE PEOPLE.

it's great for seeing your down/upload speeds (in kilobytes and kilobits per second ) and easily allows you to keep track of how much of your cap you have used (I've got 250mb at the moment which should just about do me the day, conveniently ).

it's a great tool, and just about everyone here would recommend it, even though it's only a 30 day trial, you'll be whipping out your credit card to order it (or your warez monkey hat if you're that way inclined) by the time the trial is up. it's an indispensable piece of kit for broadband.

P.S. make that 222mb of cap left.

flyinfishmonkey

Cheers for that VIBE! I will give it a whirl and see what I think of it...

Mutant_Fruit

Even though i was shot down in a previous thread for saying this, i'll repeat it again.

Kilobytes are now abbreviated to KiB instead of the previous kB. Its part of a "new" standard which was introduced quite a number of years ago, but is only now really taking off. I presume this is partly to stop the common confusion between kb and kB.

In December 1998, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved a new IEC International Standard. Instead of using the metric prefixes for multiples in binary code, the new IEC standard invented specific prefixes for binary multiples made up of only the first two letters of the metric prefixes and adding the first two letters of the word "binary". Thus, for instance, instead of Kilobyte (KB) or Gigabyte (GB), the new terms would be kibibyte (KiB) or gibibyte (GiB).

Moriarty

The problem is, MF, it isn't taking off. It's used in one or two p2p programs, that's about it.

luckat

I downloaded and installed the Mac program Speed Download to check the real "speed" of my slo-o-o-o-ow IBB Breeze Home connection. It's now downloading a game demo as a test, and is giving the average speed at about 5 k/s. But what does k/s stand for, and how does it relate to the 512kbps that IBB offers?

Ripwave

Moriarty wrote:

The problem is, MF, it isn't taking off. It's used in one or two p2p programs, that's about it.

It also doesn't do anything to stop the common confusion between kb and kB.

The purpose of KiB is to stop the confusion between 1,000 Bytes and 1024 Bytes, (2.4% difference) or more significantly, the confusion between 1,000,000 Bytes and 1,048,576 Bytes (MB versus MiB, 4.9% difference) or the confusion between 1,000,000,000 Bytes and 1,073,741,824 (GB versus GiB, 7.4% difference).

It has absolutely nothing to do with bits versus bytes - you can have kibibits as well as kibibytes. In fact, the examples on the NIST website includes both bits and bytes.