Mbps or MB/s? Why your download looks slower than your plan
One small letter is the difference between bits and bytes, and a factor of eight.
Internet plans are sold in megabits per second (Mbps). Download windows usually show megabytes per second (MB/s). A lowercase b means bit, a capital B means byte, and one byte is 8 bits.
The quick rule
Divide Mbps by 8 to get MB/s. A 100 Mbps plan tops out at 12.5 MB/s, and real downloads land a little lower because some capacity goes on network overhead.
| Plan speed | Best-case download |
|---|---|
| 50 Mbps | 6.25 MB/s |
| 100 Mbps | 12.5 MB/s |
| 500 Mbps | 62.5 MB/s |
| 1 Gbps | 125 MB/s |
The same puzzle on your hard drive
Drive makers count a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. Many computers count in binary units, where a gibibyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes. That is why a new “1 TB” drive shows up as roughly 931 GB on your computer. Nothing is missing; the two numbers just use different units.
Try it yourself