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Comment by thangngoc89 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. That’s a fast connection (Also are you sure it’s a 200MBPS and not 200Mbps?). Something like that would cost around 100USD and only available for businesses.

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I love how we let ISPs get away with advertising speeds to consumers in bits per second when all data, like file size, is displayed to those consumers in bytes. Everyone basically thinks their speed is 8x faster than it is.

I am still regularly fooled by it.

I get your point because I also often have to just pause and realize the difference every once and a while, but I also don't think it's all that deceptive. Who among regular people are really fooled by the difference? If you are none the wiser about MB why would you be fooled by ratings listed in Mb? I would think most people's cognizance about that extends no further than, e.g., 100Mb is less than 200Mb and that is less than 300Mb and I want the highest number I can get.

I guess what I am saying is that all things are really relative and humans operate on generalizations, e.g., in this case assumptions that a higher number is better just like a higher number of apples is better than less apples.

It's usually the technical obsessive types, most prevalent in the modern era that are obsessive and work themselves into a frenzy about things that are both inconsequential and also only really matter in the bubble they have constructed around themselves. "We must save the poor innocent people from the evil deceptions of MB vs Mb!" decries the obsessive modern … while the regular person just shrugs and says "I don't care, I'm buying the biggest number I can for the credits I have. I don't understand any of this anyways. I just want my drug of empty stimuli as fast as possible. I have Disney content to watch."

> Who among regular people are really fooled by the difference?

Just about everyone I've ever happened to talk about it with. Regular people don't know the difference.

One of the most classic complaints in 10+ years of having roommates is how our download speed never matches the one on the tin. And most of the time it's at least kinda close, but the person complaining doesn't realize they're off by 8x and will always feel extremely ripped off.

The responses to my comment are sadly predictable. We have a hard time admitting when computing is failing and deceiving people just because us power-users can navigate the confusion.

I think the opposite assertion of your post is the more realistic one. The only people who want to see the unit of "megabits" are the niche nerds, not my roommate trying to decide which ISP package is going to be good enough for him by estimating how long it would take him to download a 1gb movie. He thinks a 1 megabit connection is going to take 15-20min.

Network interface speeds are usually specified in Mbits, so it's not just the ISPs.

Worth noting that's because their smallest operation can be a bit, whereas when it comes to storage that doesn't really make as much sense.

It also makes sense since it's the same as frequency, and historically with baud rates in the 10s and 100s it makes sense to not divide it by 8.

I'm pretty sure you can't transmit a single bit over any commercially available internet access technology that is metered by data.

It's really just convention.

They're not "getting away" with anything. Your network is a serial stream. The bitrate is what matters. At the dawn of IP, machines with 5,6,7,8,9,16, and 18 bit "bytes" were commonplace. Bitrate is the only common way to measure data rates among dissimilar architectures.

This doesn't describe reality now (and hasn't for a while), all the reasons that are left are deceptive ones.

Arguable counterpoint: HDMI/DP in HDR mode, with typically 10 or 12 bit per channel. I think DP still crams it into bytes, but last I checked, HDMI doesn't do anything like that. They tend to just send the raw binary image content.

We were speaking about the speeds on internet connections and their hypothetical need to be stated in bits. No good argument for that exists today. You've provided an architectural detail for something most people won't know about and broadly doesn't matter when speaking of the internet besides.

Yes sorry it's 200 Mega Bits per second.

edit: the pricing page of ACT for reference - https://www.actcorp.in/broadband/chennai/broadband-plans

I am sure it is Mbps not MBPS. Same here with Jio Fiber [1]. Get 100 Mbps with 400GB data per month at at 699₹ (approx 10$) per month.

[1]: https://www.jio.com/fiber/en-in/plans

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