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FCC to propose a minimum 100mbps to qualify as broadband, with a future goal of 1gbps (docs.fcc.gov)

submitted 10 months ago by spiritedpause to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (4 children)

You might have figured it out by now, but "megabits per second" is abbreviated as "Mbps" with an uppercase m; yeah, it's kinda pedantic, but using lowercase means it's a millibit, which is much, much smaller. The same applies to "gigabits per second," which should be expressed as "Gbps."

At any rate, thank you for posting this, it really is good news. And about time they did this, too.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think it's common parlance to use Mbps and mbps interchangeably since nothing uses "millibits" as a unit of measurement. More commonly people misuse Mbps and MBps which is incorrect since it signifies bits and bytes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

To avoid the Mb/MB confusion I've gotten in the habit of writing Mbit and MByte, so there's really no ambiguity (like, even if I used them right, it's reasonable that people might not be sure if I'm using them right or not)

At least when talking about network-related things, particularly transfer rates. With storage and things it's way more rare that anyone might be talking about bits.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

No one would ever say millibits, because a bit is the smallest meaningful datapoint. It's a non-existent term, and a very pointless pedantic hill to try to build so that you can die on it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Literally no one means "millibit" when they type mbps.....

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

There is no 1000ths of a 0 or 1.

Milibit does not exist.

Network speed is measured in Megabits per second, which is indeed 8 times smaller than Megabyte per second that OSes show when transferring files.