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this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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50 GB? That’s a couple iOS or other OS update, or just streaming video a lot. A quick check shows my house over 500GB last month.
Gonna ration data with the same ethos they restrict what people on food stamps can purchase.
It’s 30 mins at full speed.
It's around 4.5 hours at full speed. Remember that internet speeds are in megabits, not megabytes to falsely increase the speed number as well.
Internet speeds being measured in bits instead of bytes is absolutely not to falsely represent Internet speeds, nor is there anything false about it to begin with. Measuring network transmission speeds in bits is an engineering custom used in telecommunications long before consumer internet existed and for good reason. A byte being 8 bits is the standard today, but in the past a computers byte could be anywhere from 1 to 48 bits depending on your hardware, therefore measuring internet speeds in bytes per second would be meaningless.
Even today where we’ve standardized 8 bits to a byte, measuring internet speeds in Bytes or Megabytes per second would actually be more misleading than the Megabits we use today, since not every bit in a packet is used for user data transfer nor is there even user data in every packet. 25 megabits per second is equal in size to 3.125 megabytes per second, but if you put 3.125 megabytes per second on the tin, people will expect for example to be able to download a file at 3.125 megabytes per second but they can’t. Assuming no bottlenecks and perfect efficiently, they’d only be able to download a file at a speed closer to 2.5Megabytes per second.
There are good reasons to use bits for engineers, but residential internet consumers are not engineers. In no other context do you market incomprehensible engineering details, just here because higher number is better marketing. Almost everyone I know is confused why the speeds they pay for don't match the speed of downloads in Chrome. Marketing in bits is anti-consumer, since average consumer does not understand what actual download speed they will get when buying.
It’s not anti-consumer to advertise a product’s capabilities in the most accurate way possible. When you pay for internet bandwidth you’re not paying for download speed, you’re paying for a transmission rate. Advertising internet plans based on the speeds you get in Chrome would not be possible and therefore any attempt to do so would be deceptive to the customer.
The Internet bandwidth they pay for will never match the speed of downloads in Chrome, even if you convert bits to bytes.
What you’re missing here is that you want the number you pay for from your ISP and the number you can measure downloading a file at to match. But they never will, because they’re two completely different concepts. One of those number is a constituent part of the other number. They’re not interchangeable.
Why wouldn't it be possible? Convert Mbit/s to a reasonable real-world mb/s estimation for download/upload to a reasonably close location, with some losses built into the estimate.
You’re asking why it’s not possible, and then explained a work around that would be needed because it’s not possible.
What you’re suggesting is that instead of selling a service to you based on a quantifiable number based on things within their control that you can reasonably hold them accountable for, they should sell their service to you based on a series of educated guesses about what you could potentially get based on a number of factors entirely outside of their control.
Elsewhere in the thread it looks like some ISPs do exactly that! Not sure why you are against the mb/s estimate.
Edit: thanks for the detail re: Mbit in your other answer!
I still think an estimate of Mbit/8 e.g. mb/s would still be a more useful thing for consumers to compare to the download rates they're actually getting.
The first speedtest I ever used was from the ISP and gave results in Mbit -- which confused 12 y.o. me because I was not getting anything close to that when I downloaded files.
If the speedtest said 1 mb/s and then I got 0.8 mb/s downloading from a server, I wouldn't call ISP support, but I think we did call support when the speedtest said we were getting "10 M" but our downloads were closer to 1.1 mb/s.
You can give an accurate enough estimate. Yes, you may have to make some assumptions on protocol and server. And yes, you will be a few percent off. But so what? It is much more informative to the average consumer than transmission rate. In the first place, transmission rate is also a meaningless metric without information on overprovisioning, latencies, etc. Except instead of an understandable but slightly inaccurate download speed estimate, you have one engineering parameter that is unhelpful to an engineer anyway without more information as well as not understandable to the average consumer.
PS: I am not saying I can't include engineering parameters, but it shouldn't be the main marketing number.
Accurate enough for who? It wouldn’t be accurate enough for me. And it certainly wouldn’t be accurate enough for the consumer who you described as expecting that estimate to match reality. And worst of all, it wouldn’t be enough for any consumer protection agencies or remedies. So many assumptions would have to be made based on factors entirely outside of their control in order to sell to you based on your file download speed. And if you allow them to sell you a product based on assumptions of things outside of their control, then you then have no recourse to hold them accountable. I don’t want companies to sell me a product based on a number offered via a shrug. I want a promised number I can measure against what I’m getting.
Transmission rate is the only metric with any meaning in this context, because the transmission rate is the product they’re selling to you. The overprovisioning and etc is actually accounted for in the transmission rate they’re selling you. Thats why they almost always overprovision your connection based on what you’re paying for.
It’s as if you’re asking for a car dealer to sell you vehicles based on how many how many people you can move between two locations per hour, instead of the number of seats it has and the speed it can go. They would have to start making guesses based on the average waistline of people in your area, the speed limits of the roads in your town, your driving ability, what routes you like to take, etc. that might be sorta handy because you don’t have to do that math yourself now, but it’s not going to be all that accurate to you specifically, and if that number of people is lower than what they estimated, it’s kinda on you because they don’t know if your friends are petite or 600 lbs, etc etc. But if they sell you a car that seats 5 people of normal healthy size and it can go 100mph, and they deliver you something that seats 4 with a top speed of 80, they’re accountable for that.
What are you talking about? Overprovisioning literally means selling more transmission rate than what the upstream lines can accommodate. It is not accounted for. Therefore, you only get your advertised transmission rate if your neighbors are not fully utilizing theirs.
How can it not be accurate enough when it is just a conversion from transmission rate via a formula that converts to bytes and accounts for expected protocol overheads? It's the same number, converted to easily understandable units. If it is not accurate enough, neither is transmission rate.
I’m talking about overprovisioning, where your ISP actually provisions you for more bandwidth than you’re paying for. It is accounted for.
You’re talking over subscription.
Are you asking me how a flat base number derived direct from the source is more accurate than a different number that takes that first number and then adds a bunch of guesswork on top based on a bunch of unknown variables? Well that’s because in your head “expected protocol overheads” must be a simpler and more quantifiable number than it is in real life. For starters, which protocol? Downloads happen over TCP and UDP, both have completely different overhead profiles. What about the protocols above that? How are we proposing the file is being downloaded? Tor? SMB? NFS? HTTP? MLS stream? Which OS is the client? Different operating systems have different TCP window scaling logic. Different devices have different MTU sizes. The Internet service you’re buying can be used for all of them. Are we picking picking one set based on the most common use case? Averaging them all together? Weighting them based on common usage? Uhhh or we could just advertise the product based on the product the ISP is actually selling you, the transmission rate.
Your entire argument here is like being upset at McDonald’s for giving you the nutrient values of their food, like calorie counts and detailed macronutrient breakdowns, because you think instead they should just tell you how full each item will make you.
I really can’t break this down any simpler for you than I already have.
Dude, what is your fixation on the protocol parameters? I said average. Yes, for the purpose of getting the exact speed Chrome downloads shit, it will be off by a few percent. Who cares? The weight of the food you buy is allowed to be off by a few percent. The calories in food are already an approximation based on energy released while burning, not digestion. Every measurement in the world has error bars.
But a number most people can understand is a lot more useful than a slightly more accurate representation of the same number most people don't understand. I am sure you can still find the details in a spec sheet if you feel too smart to use the simple representation and too lazy to convert it back.
Ok, let's say I used the wrong term for the sake of the argument. Point, is (most) ISPs don't guarantee your full ratelimit will be available to you. Which you clearly understood yet did not address.
I mean, wasn't this discussion started by whether bits per second or bytes per second is deceptive or misleading in order to make people think "woah, bigger number means better internet" ?
Also, how is a division or multiplication by a factor of 8 the difference between what most people do or don't understand? It's a primary school mathematical operation. If people cannot understand that, how are they going to understand that different downloads or uploads inside different applications provide them with different (byte-based) values depending on protocol and server performance of whatever service they are using?
It really is the truest and simplest unit to use that the ISP can reasonably guarantee to you, because on the lowest level, whether using fibre or copper, we send bits and not bytes across the wire.
If it wasn't to confuse people, they could just show both bits and bytes. There's no reason not to. I've seen this occasionally with ethical ISPs who care about their customers (extremely rare) - they would display it like this:
Almost everyone I know who isn't in tech is extremely confused by this distinction. Absolutely they keep the bigger number because it directly benefits them. If they're offering the 3 speed, but competitors are offering the 25 speed, of course customers want the bigger number! Normies don't even know what a bit is.
I don't particularly think the historical value of a byte is really relevant either. It's been 8 bits for half a century now.
I don't think it's a big deal or a hill to die on or anything. Since everyone does it, at least it's consistent. But the industry is kind of shooting themselves in the foot because they get ten thousand service desk calls per day complaining about slow internet speeds that are less than one eighth of the advertised number.
But what prefix? You could end up showing 4 units: Megabits, Mebibits, Megabytes and Mebibytes. Although there's also the JEDEC 100B.01, under which binary prefix is used with KB, MB, GB, TB, where the only clear difference is between kB and KB.
In that case, you get the insane 1TB = ~1.1TB or 1TB = 0.9TB that you see on Windows.
My favorite example of unit confusion is the "1.44MB floppy", which is neither true in MB, nor MiB, because it's actually 1,440KiB, so it's either ~1.47MB or ~1.41MiB.
There’s no reason not to include a helpful subtitle that gives you an approximation of file download speeds ( other than consumers mistaking it as a promise the company can’t actually keep), but that’s a completely different animal than advertising the bandwidth itself in bytes. Because simply converting the bits into bytes will not result in the number that the customer ultimately sees.
All you would have in that scenario is the same confused consumer calling the service desk asking why the number of Megabytes they paid for is not the number of Megabytes they get when they download a file.
This as absolutely a hill worth dying on for me. I don’t think it would be a good thing for companies to stop advertising their products based on their precise and accurate capabilities in order to sell to a consumer based on a guesstimate around one subset of use of that product.
Found the marketer.
Not a marketer, just a network engineer who cares about honest and accurate advertising.
By defending the least honest or accurate advertising in existence?
Okay....
Uh no by defending the completely honest and objectively accurate advertising. As opposed to the inaccurate and misleading advertising that would be advertising based on file download speed.
How is the Mbit number an accurate value? In my understanding it was also an upward bound of an estimate
Modern networks pass data serially bit by bit over a wire. So on the lowest level networking works on a bit level, not a byte level. There is some logical stuff in upper protocol layers that will actually group things by bytes and such, but when you strip everything down to the smallest detail of what networking does, transmit data over a wire via electricity or lights, or otherwise wirelessly, its bits.
The Mbit number your your ISP sells to you is actually lower than what you actually get, to ensure that you get what you paid them for. If you track your bandwidth usage closely you’ll notice you burst higher than what that number it’s “up to” because there are variables outside of their control as well. So it’s not a hard ceiling, but a rate they promise to be available to you.
I repeated what you wrote here because I only now scrolled down, but thank you for being accurate about this. It really is a hill worth dying on, in my humble opinion.
No matter how you flip it, when it comes down to the lowest level of bits travelling over the wire, using bits/s is really the only option to use for ISP providers.
Follow up, is this rate limited by the link from your home to their local node primarily, or from their local node to the broader internet?