A bit is the smallest unit of data. Just a 0 or a 1. That’s a bit. A byte is 8 bits grouped together and that is where data starts becoming more human-friendly.
So the ladder looks like:
- Byte
- Kilobyte
- Megabyte
- Gigabyte
- Terabyte
All multiplied by a factor of roughly 1000 (exactly 1024). That’s the language of the storage. But netwok measures speed in bits, not bytes. That means when I say our connection at home is 1 gigabit per second, I’m talking about Gbps with a lowercase b for bits. If I am talking about a file size in MB. I’m talking about megabytes with a uppercase B.
So, if we want to know how long it takes to download a 100MB file if our 1 Gbps connection the calculation is as follows:
1 Gbps = 1000 Mbps -> to get to MB we have to divide by 8 (cause 8 bits are 1 byte).
1000 Mbps / 8 -> 125 -> so our connection can transfer about 125 MB per second. Which means to download that file it takes us less then 1 second.