this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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Found the marketer.
Not a marketer, just a network engineer who cares about honest and accurate advertising.
How is the Mbit number an accurate value? In my understanding it was also an upward bound of an estimate
Modern networks pass data serially bit by bit over a wire. So on the lowest level networking works on a bit level, not a byte level. There is some logical stuff in upper protocol layers that will actually group things by bytes and such, but when you strip everything down to the smallest detail of what networking does, transmit data over a wire via electricity or lights, or otherwise wirelessly, its bits.
The Mbit number your your ISP sells to you is actually lower than what you actually get, to ensure that you get what you paid them for. If you track your bandwidth usage closely you’ll notice you burst higher than what that number it’s “up to” because there are variables outside of their control as well. So it’s not a hard ceiling, but a rate they promise to be available to you.
I repeated what you wrote here because I only now scrolled down, but thank you for being accurate about this. It really is a hill worth dying on, in my humble opinion.
No matter how you flip it, when it comes down to the lowest level of bits travelling over the wire, using bits/s is really the only option to use for ISP providers.
I actually appreciate you taking over arguing with that knucklehead haha. Guy is a menace lol
Follow up, is this rate limited by the link from your home to their local node primarily, or from their local node to the broader internet?
It’s from your home to their local node primarily. You’re essentially paying for the link into their network.
By defending the least honest or accurate advertising in existence?
Okay....
Uh no by defending the completely honest and objectively accurate advertising. As opposed to the inaccurate and misleading advertising that would be advertising based on file download speed.
Bet you think a gigabyte is a thousand megabytes too.
Yes in networking we use the decimals based decimal-based Gigabyte and Megabyte.
So Megabyte = 1000 Bytes Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes.
When referring to the binary based system, like with computer RAM we use Mebibytes = 1024 bytes Gebibytes = 1024 Mebibytes
Damn, you really just outed yourself like that.
Well, I rest my case.
As knowledgeable engineer who knows accurate technical terms? I should hope so. That’s been self evident from the start.