• SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    100 mbps? That's 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I'd certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that's slower than smoke signals.

    • simple@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names

      • thantik@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        We should change to mibibits! We need easily factored numbers of 10, not this old powers of 2 stuff! (/s if it wasn't obvious)

        • Bassman1805@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Sarcasm noted, but: mibi/gibi are the powers of 2 version.

          We all say megabit or gigabit when talking about internet speeds, but in many cases under the hood it's actually measured in mibi/gibibits. Just means it's 2% more when converted into base 10 ;)

          • ripcord@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Good point on the first part. On the second… There's very little networking stuff that isn't pretty much handled in powers of 10 everywhere. I mean, eventually every number gets handled as binary at some point, but otherwise it's pretty rare for network values to get converted to some power-of-2 number.

            Way more common is the stupid bits/bytes confusion.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        The reason we don't is because the network does not care how the files you transfer are formatted.

        It measure the amount of bits it can transfer.

        Whether the file in question is for example a text document (8bit) or a HEIF (10bit)

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.

    • Calavera@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I almost replied saying you had no idea you were talking about, but then I realized… Lol

    • antlion@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Except that’s like dividing by zero. A millibit is undefined. A bit is the smallest indivisible unit of digital information.

      But capitalization is important to distinguish between b for bit and B for Byte.

      • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        No, that's like dividing by 1,000.

        Anyway, computer scientists split the bit back in 1969, which is how we're able to make smaller and smaller computers: the bits are all smaller, so we can pack more into a single potato chip.

      • Pretzilla@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Good catch but not quite. bps is a rate so it is allowed to be an abstract expression.

        How many chickens per hour cross the road?

        And more importantly, why.

      • Kevin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If you had really slow Internet, like smoke signals or semaphores across a nation, you could characterize it as millibit:

        1 bit over 1000 seconds = 1 millibit/s.

        But yeah, it's basically meaningless in today's age for Internet speeds.

    • thesmokingman@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      The title used the wrong abbreviation and you didn’t read the linked press release. The previous standard was 25/3 Mbps so there’s no reason to downgrade; had you bothered to read the link you’re supposedly commenting on you’d see the new standard is 100/20 Mbps. That’s also laughably low for a regular household with a modicum of modern usage but we can’t really expect much from agencies under regulatory capture.