On Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:15:48 +0000 (UTC), SteveBell wrote:
Jim Redelfs wrote:

In article ,
AZ Nomad wrote:

Sure you're not confusing Mb/s with MB/s?

Probably.

Is there an "authority" that decides which abbreviation is for which
measurement?

megaBITS per second

megaBYTES per second

One is VASTLY different than the other.

I believe all communication/networking throughput is rated in
megaBITS per second.

Take your pick of authorities. The prominent ones are the ISO, IEC,
IEEE, EU, and NIST. I'll leave it to you to look all those up, but IEC
seems to be the most prominent. They all defer to each other and quote
each other in publications.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia article that discusses bitrates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate

Common measures a
bps, Kbps, Mbps, and Gbps, depending on whether you're talking about
serial printers, acoustic modems, hard drive cables, or Ethernet
routers. Tbps are not too far away.

To complicate things, there are lots of people who insist that a "K" is
1024 instead of the usual 1000. They have a legitimate point in lots of
cases, so the official name for that unit is "kibi" instead of "kilo".

p.s. Don't forget about "baud rates". :-)


Lower case b is bits. Uppercase B is Bytes.
goofy, huh?

1000's are pretty much only used by drive manufacturers to arrive at larger
figures.