this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
880 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
89678 readers
4224 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Dude, what is your fixation on the protocol parameters? I said average. Yes, for the purpose of getting the exact speed Chrome downloads shit, it will be off by a few percent. Who cares? The weight of the food you buy is allowed to be off by a few percent. The calories in food are already an approximation based on energy released while burning, not digestion. Every measurement in the world has error bars.
But a number most people can understand is a lot more useful than a slightly more accurate representation of the same number most people don't understand. I am sure you can still find the details in a spec sheet if you feel too smart to use the simple representation and too lazy to convert it back.
Ok, let's say I used the wrong term for the sake of the argument. Point, is (most) ISPs don't guarantee your full ratelimit will be available to you. Which you clearly understood yet did not address.
I mean, wasn't this discussion started by whether bits per second or bytes per second is deceptive or misleading in order to make people think "woah, bigger number means better internet" ?
Also, how is a division or multiplication by a factor of 8 the difference between what most people do or don't understand? It's a primary school mathematical operation. If people cannot understand that, how are they going to understand that different downloads or uploads inside different applications provide them with different (byte-based) values depending on protocol and server performance of whatever service they are using?
It really is the truest and simplest unit to use that the ISP can reasonably guarantee to you, because on the lowest level, whether using fibre or copper, we send bits and not bytes across the wire.
No one who was not specifically taught this will notice the difference between Mbps and MBps since it's the same fucking letters. Let alone know the difference is division by 8. Not everyone has formal IT education and bits never come out in daily life of most people except for internet speeds. You are expert in this field. You massively overestimate how much average people know if you think they recognize the difference and know how to convert it.
Why do you keep insisting they need to? An average person will not care much about the difference between a download taking 6 minutes or 7 minutes. They will care about the difference between 6 minutes and an hour, which is about the difference if they misinterpret bits as bytes.