On Wed, Dec 23, 2020 at 10:56:36AM +0100, Nicolas George wrote:
Anyway, why would anybody honest want to use this kind of unit to measure an actual speed is beyond me. The only point to speak in kilo/mega/gigabits per second instead is to make the numbers seem larger to attract clueless customers.
No, network speeds are traditionally measured in bits because networks transferred data in bits and telcos dealt with bits, and they sold and billed bits. Computer internals were measured in bytes and words because they transferred data in bytes and words. Some people do now talk about network speeds for computers in byte units, but you're really just swapping one source of confusion for another when you do that. (There's an immense amount of existing tooling for network-related information that already uses bits, so everything that decides bytes are better for networking requires conversion when dealing with most other networking tools even if it eliminates conversion when dealing with filesystem or memory tools.) There isn't one "right answer" that magically simplifies communications. The most obvious improvement, as always, is to simply write out "bit" and "byte" and not abbreviate them because everybody forgets which is capitalized. "octet" was a term that was actually needed before bytes were standardized to 8 bits, but that usage confuses far more people than it helps these days.