Hacker News Reader

Comment by cpfohl | Hacker News Reader

Not how it’s usually measured…link speed is pretty much always in bits/s

But it's not measuring link speed directly. It's measuring transfer rate through TCP which is byte oriented. It's not possible to receive partial bytes via TCP (or UDP for that matter).

I don't measure file size in bits. I don't want to multiply/divide by 8 when roughly estimating how long a download will take. I end up doing 10 instead for maximum ease and pessimism.

At least it’s no longer in baud.

Link speed has always been measured in bits/s or as sibling comment suggests baud which is, still, just bits per second.

Obviously a huge part of this is marketing for modems, ISPs, network cards, etc. but it’s consistent. The conversion to GB/s is fairly simple and doable with the super key, or super space on Mac in every modern OS…

I agree with you that the difference is irritating, but wouldn’t have done any different if I were Cloudflare.

> baud which is, still, just bits per second.

Isn't the baud-rate the number of signal transitions per second? How that maps to bits per second depends on the wire encoding.

This is probably more accurate! I was relying on fuzzy memories from an era long past! Thanks for the correction.

> The conversion to GB/s is fairly simple and doable with the super key, or super space on Mac in every modern OS…

Or the dedicated button on my keyboard that spawns a calculator. I don't care, though.

So what if it's usually bad?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com