Business Internet

Broadband Speeds – What is a Megabit?

Do you know your megabit from your megabyte?

We know that we can be guilty of putting out the odd bit of technical language related to our products without adequately explaining what things are and what it means, and Broadband speeds are one of these. If you don’t know your Megabits from your Megabytes – and what this means for your internet connection – then this blog is for you! These terms might be evident to techie people – there are 8 bits in a byte – but, (and this is for the SoConnect tech team) we can’t all be up to date on the history of computing!

Read on as we explain some of the most bandied about terms when it comes to connectivity.

Mega-what?

A ‘Megabit’ (or Mb) is the term most commonly used to talk about an internet connection’s speed. The higher the rate of Megabit, the faster your broadband. A Mb is a multiple of a bit, and there are one million bits in a single Mb.

Usually, broadband speeds are communicated at a per second rate. Megabits per second (Mbps) is a measurement of data transfer speed.

To demonstrate this, take a look at two of SoConnect’s fibre broadband packages: FTTC 40:10 and FTTC 80:20. Broadband Pricing (4)

The 40:10 package relates to maximum speeds of 40Mbps download and 10Mbps upload, while the 80:20 will double those speeds. The better the connection, the higher those numbers will be.

Bit/byte – which one is right?

A ‘Megabyte’ (or MB) is a measurement of storage. Megabit has a little ‘b’ (Mb), and Megabyte has a big ‘B’ (MB) – and they’re very different. Bit means speed, and byte represents storage.

It takes 8 Megabits to make 1 Megabyte; this means that for you to download 1MB (Megabyte) in one second, your broadband needs to be 8Mb/8Mbps (Megabit/Megabit per second).

So, (if you are still with us) say that you wanted to download a film that was 4,000MB (Megabytes) of storage, and your internet speed is 40Mbps, how long would it take? 12.5 mins. However, with a speed of 80Mbps, the time to download would half – 6.25 mins.

A Gigabit

When we look at some of the higher speed connections such as FTTP, GFast and Leased Line, we start to talk about Gigabits. There are 1,000 Megabits in 1 Gigabit (or Gb, or Gbps, or Gig). That’s a dizzying 1 billion bits!

Here’s what you can do with 1Gb:

18 seconds to download a TV episode

40 seconds to download a whole film

2 seconds to upload 100 high-resolution photos

While we are on about leased lines, other terms you might hear us talk about are symmetrical and asymmetrical speeds.

What does symmetrical and asymmetrical bandwidth mean?

Standard domestic and business broadband services typically offer asymmetrical bandwidth, with upload speeds being considerably lower than download speeds. Symmetrical bandwidth is when your upload speed is the same as the download speed. Leased Line services offer this type of bandwidth and it comes with significant advantages.