Which clearly raises questions. The computer industry has mucked up the definition of a byte. Is it 8 bits (i.e. 2^3 bits)?
or is it 10 bits? Is a "kilobit" 1000 bits or 1024 bits (i.e. 2 ^7 bits)? Depends who you ask
Hard drive manufactures are gonna say a "kilobit" is 1000 bits. That way their 40 "gigabyte" hard drives are the smallest possible.
For example, an 80 "gig" hard drive according to the hard drive manufacture would be 80,000,000,000 bits. If you converted that into
8-bit Bytes, that would be 74.5 GigaBytes. So when you buy an 80 'gig' hard drive, it is really 74.5 GigaBytes. Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky...
Back to the point: on the other hand, Microsoft Windows and most other OS's are gonna say a "kilobit" is 1024 bits...
At any rate (pun intended), in the telecom and networking world, a "kilobit" is 1000 bits as per the IEEE. Note the small "k" as oposed to the large "Ki"
or just large "K". So in theory, "kbps" = 1000 bps and "Kbps" = 1024 bps.
What FURTHER confuses this issue is that for all of you windows users out there, when you download a file using
say Internet Explorer, they report the download rate in KB/sec or KiloByte per second... So they are reporting
your download "network speed" in terms of "storage space", not to be confused with hard drive manufacture specification nomenclature...
See how vicious of a circle this is!? Really it's not that big of a difference until you
go and code a page like this where to be technically correct you have to take all of this into account!
smallest unit of digital information, i.e. ones & zeros
bps
=
bits per second
=
a single 1 or 0 per second
kbps
=
kilobits per second
=
1,000 bps
mbps
=
megabits per second
=
1,000 kbps or 1,000,000 bps
gbps
=
gigabits per second
=
1,000 mbps or 1,000,000,000 bps
EXCEPT FOR the option where you enter your speed in KB/sec. For that *one* row I've
chosen to represent the speed in KiloByte/second as this is the nomenclature used on most of the common MS
Windows programs that download/upload. It is properly labeled as "KB/sec" and does the calculation based off
of that.
Changelog:
2006.04.10 - modified to work w/ IE5+ and NS6+ (tested on FF 1.5)
Note: Assumes Northern America Connections Unless Otherwise Indicated.
Dedication: This module is dedicated to Punk_Ass cause I talked stern to him!
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