Talk:Data-rate units

What is this.

Seriously, what. Who has the authority to retroactively redefine a standard that's been in place for 50+ years? A Kilobyte has ALWAYS been 1024 bytes and a Kilobit has ALWAYS been 1000 bits. Adding a third corrupt (and ridiculous sounding) standard to the mix just because hard drive manufacturers are getting sued because they wrongly define their drives in Megabytes instead of Megabits isn't a reason to change the entire basis of space measurement in computing. Hard drive manufacturers need to change, the world doesn't revolve around them.

Most operating systems use 1024 = kbyte and 1000 = kbit and have been doing so forever. I surely hope that people don't start catering to drive manufacturers just because they try and corrupt a standard. Ggigabitem (talk) 09:56, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Page creation

This page was created to merge all the articles like kilobit per second and mebibit per second. A merge was discussed a few times on pages like Talk:Bit_rate#Merge_of_bit.2Fs_articles and Talk:Kilobit_per_second#Merge_into_Bit_rate.3F and was supported, but no one got around to it.

I think it's important that, no matter how we arrange this page, clicking a link like kilobit per second should take you directly to a definition of the unit (through a redirect to an anchor link in the merged page). Whether that anchor link is a section header or part of a table, though, is up for discussion. — Omegatron 02:07, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Abbreviations

The page currently seems to suggest using b/s as an abbreviation for bit/s. That is a serious mistake, as it invites confusion with Byte/s. The case difference is not enough in practice. The most usual way to give data rates (bit rates) is bit/s, kbit/s, Mbit/s, etc. (or bps, kbps, Mbps, for those who would still rather write cps instead of Hz). This avoids any confusion with bytes and makes it clear that k, M, G are SI prefixes and not multiples of 1024.

This needs to be fixed.

Fixed,

MahatmaWatcher (talk) 19:24, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

SI vs. CS unit confusion

I think this is a great start. I've avoided past discussion because there were too many articles involved.

As someone with a TRANSMISSION background, I have always seen transmission system rates discussed in some form of "decimal prefix bits" / second - never bytes, never binary prefixes. Also, rates always referred to the "line rate" as opposed to the "data transfer rate", when talking about the transmission system. When talking about COMPUTER SYSTEM data transfer rates, I understand and agree with the use of bytes and binary prefixes. This perspective makes comments like "Bytes are typically used in modern systems" and "1536k T1 — 1,536,000 bit/s (1.536 Mbit/s)" wrong. In the former case, bits are still predominantly (exclusively?) used in modern systems and in the latter case, the correct T1 rate is 1.544 Mbit/s. Does anyone else share this line of thought? Bellhead (talk) 02:32, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes. "Mbit/s" always means 1,000,000 bits per second. It is not subject to the computer science ambiguity.

File transfer, though, is often in bytes; KB/s or whatever, which is ambiguous and means different things in different contexts.

To my knowledge, no one ever uses Kibit/s (or "binary kilobits per second") for anything. Only byte rates are expressed as binary multiples. — Omegatron 01:20, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I noticed that the article says 'when a "1 Meg" connection is advertised, it usually means 1 Mib/s', but it seems to me that this would usually mean 1 Mbit/s (1000x1000 bits/sec), based on the comments above. -- 15.203.233.76 (talk) 18:31, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

I noticed that the VHS/DVD/HDTV data rates in the megabit per second section were in Mbytes/s - different to the Mbits/s used in the surrounding text. I checked the data rates for DVD here [1], and found DVD to be 8Mbits/s as opposed to 8Mbytes/s in the text. Also, for HDTV I found a data rate of 27Mbit/s here [2]. With VHS I wasn't sure - isn't it an analog format?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.168.20.32 (talk) 05:00, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that the purpose of this page is to clarify terminology regarding data rate units. Now, it's a nice little theoretical explanation, which I would be happy to support, by propagating for it, if I was entitled to. But as long as this theory is not applied/enforced by whoever it may concern (software developers, hardware manufacturers, vendors etc) then the information on this page only creates confusion. It's actually telling people something that is not true.

An example: Let's say we use a download client that is telling us that it's currently downloading by 653 kB/s. I bet that most people who have read this page actually believes the client is actually refering to 653,000 bytes per second. My suspicions are that most developers are actually still using the binary definitions. This should be clarified. I'm thinking; the first part of the page should be called something like "transition period" that explains how some software developers are still using the binary definitions and maybe a section below of a small list of famous companies that have adopted the new standard? Thoughts? — MahatmaWatcher (talk) 09:49, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Bandwidths

Instead of listing examples here, should we just link to List of device bandwidths? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Omegatron test account (talk • contribs) 06:44, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree, infact this whole article is in serious need of clean up. This article really needs to be simplified. I wish I had more experience editing Wikis, or I'd do it myself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.226.230.36 (talk) 18:41, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

I did a cleanup, hope the current version is okay. I agree that the List of device bandwidths should be the primary example list, but that is for physical devices only, while this page is about 'abstract' units. Data rates are also used in computing, e.g. the MS SQL Server returns a processing speed of the query in MB/s [3]; and MD5 hashing performance is also measured in MB/s [4]. These would definitely not fit to List of device bandwidths, and I think we should add a few of these examples here in the future. --Kuteni (talk) 15:47, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Megabit per second

This section currently describes 8 Megabits per second as equal to 8 Megabytes per second. I'm wondering if that should be so, because this other page says:

1 MBps (megabyte per second) = 8 mbps (megabits per second)

Which is a ratio of 8 Megabits (Mb) to 1 Megabyte (MB), which I would expect, since 8 bits = 1 byte. In other words, whatever a Megabyte per second is, a Megabit per second should equal a Megabyte divided by 8, shouldn't it? If that's so, 1 Megabyte being 1,024,000 bytes, that divided by 8 should equal 128,000 bytes, so that 1 Megabit per second = 128 bytes per second. Yes?

An admitted novice here, but unless I'm missing something, the figures in the article don't line up. --Narfnarfsillywilly (talk) 16:34, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

1 Megabyte is 1,000,000 byte, divided by 8 is 125,000 byte. TechControl (talk) 01:58, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

TechControl, what are you doing, this is obviously wrong. A megabyte is 1024 * 1024 bytes (megabyte is binary not decimal no matter what this page says!) which equals 1048756, multiplied by 8 equals 8,388,608 bits. NarfNarf, you got the number of bytes per megabyte wrong, and divided by 8 to find bits, where you should be multiplying by 8 as each byte has 8 bits, not 8 bytes sum to make 1 bit!118.92.254.90 (talk) 11:04, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Conversion formulas

There seems to be a mixup in the conversion formulas, in "kbps -> MBpm". "MBpm" isn't previously mentioned, but "MBps" is, so I assume it should only differ a factor 60. The page says: A kilobit per second (kbit/s or kb/s or kbps) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,000 bits per second, and A Megabyte per second (MB/s or MBps) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,000,000 bytes per second

But then in the formula, it says: To convert between common denotations: kbps -> MBpm ((((n * 1000) / 8) / 1024) / 1024) * 60 = m

To be consistent with the definitions above, the two 1024's should be 1000, right? - 213.132.100.2 (talk) 17:30, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

table

raw data for http://area23.brightbyte.de/csv2wp.php

name;symbol;b/s;B/s;example
bit per second;b/s;1;1/8;
byte per second;B/s;8;1;
kilobit per second;kb/s;1000 = 10^2;125 = 10^2/8;
Kibibit per second;Kib/s;1024 = 2^10;128 = 2^10/8;
kilobyte per second;kB/s;8000 = 8*10^2;1000 = 10^2;
Kibibyte per second;KiB/s;8192 = 8*2^10;1024 = 2^10;

TechControl (talk) 02:03, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Conversion formulas

I removed these sections from the page. The expanded the conversion table covers this first table IMO. However, adding some practical "how much my media download will take over my broadband" type of example calculations might be useful to the readers (something like this second table with proper formatting). --Kuteni (talk) 13:17, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

To convert between common denotations, the following formula are used.

kb/s → KiB/s	((n * 1000) / 8) / 1024 = m
kb/s → MB/m	((((n * 1000) / 8) / 1024) / 1024) * 60 = m
kb/s → MB/h	(((((n * 1000) / 8) / 1024) / 1024) * 60) * 60 = m

The following table shows how much data would theoretically be downloaded when running such a stream in some common denotations.

kb/s	50.00	150.00	139.81
KiB/s	6.10	18.31	17.07
MB/m	0.36	1.07	1.00
MB/h	21.46	64.37	60.00

Factual accuracy

This page was tagged with:

But there's no explanation as to what is wrong and it was added by a user who only made this one edit so I've removed it to here. Feel free to put it back and explain here why if there is something to be disputed. Smartse (talk) 13:49, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Well, as said at the top of this page, when has a kilobyte been 1,000 and not 1,024 bytes? And where did the kibi- mebi- etc. prefixes come from? I believe this article is incorrect and if you were to search how many bytes to a kilobyte' in google all the results on the first page would agree with me. 118.92.254.90 (talk) 10:53, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

none of this makes any sense to me. wiki contributors, you have failed.