For years, AT&T sales reps would refer to MB when they meant Mb. Soon after I started service with them, I called to ask about the promised speed, and the tech insisted they sold Mb/s. He conferenced in a salesperson and was embarrassed to discover that the salesperson talked exclusively in terms of MB/s.
They literally said it out loud. I had spent the last 7 years on a fast university network, and had never paid for internet before that. I honestly believed that they were going to deliver the speeds they claimed.
I wouldn't have believed "megabytes" was an Internet speed, because it never is. It's literally impossible for that to be a signaling rate on any known Layer 2 technology. ISPs use Gibibytes or Tebibytes (which they misname as Gigabytes/Terabytes) for transfer caps, but that's apples and oranges.
There was a time when everyone considered a kilobyte to be 1024 bytes, a megabyte to be 1024 kilobytes, and so forth. The main reason this changed is because disk manufacturers advertised e.g. 1 billion byte hard disks as having “1 GB” of capacity and, to pretend they weren’t ripping us all off, proceeded to claim that the definitions were ambiguous. But even today, if you go out and buy an 8 GB DIMM, you are getting 8 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes.
(As a historical side note, there was even a weird transitional period where a “1.44 MB 3.5 floppy” held 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes, or what everyone at the time would have called 1440 kilobytes.)
Personally I think it’s unfortunate that standards bodies and even courts have sided with the disk manufacturers. I also find the SI binary prefixes utterly revolting on an aesthetic level, so I’d much rather join whatever parts of the tech industry are still holding out.
> I wouldn't have believed "megabytes" was an Internet speed
Perhaps HNers know better, but among lay people, pretty much no one talks about megabits. For example, people know that an MP3 is about 5MB. They know that they can email attachments up to 20MB (or sometimes 10). But I've literally never heard a lay person talk about bits, or bits per second.
And the fact that ISP's transfer caps are denominated in bytes makes things all the more confusing.
I was trying to ask if there was something more that the speed test do other than multiple or divide by 8. Is some other overhead that they add in? If not, then their math or testing seem to be off or curl/wget seem to be different than they get via the browser's javascript engine. To me it seems that the speed test number is inflated or higher than what one will even for the same URL off of netflix or cloudflares URLs used in their speed tests.