Today, telephone and communication operators offer us several options to connect to the internet, whether through a router with UTP cables or a small wireless 3G / 4G modem. Most people choose Internet access devices using a very basic criterion: appearance. Those who have a little more computer knowledge choose devices for the amount of mbps, usually 3.2mbps, 7.2mbps and 21 Mbps.
Looks like a good offer, being able to download files with a 21Mbps connection.
UNDERSTAND NOW
So far there is nothing malicious about the offerings of operators, but what they do not say clearly is that mbps ( Mbps if you use the first capital letter) It is other than MBps.
The units of measurement of the data most used in computing are: bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte and finally terabyte, there are others of course, they are usually expressed using their abbreviations such as: kB, MB. Note that the second letter is always capitalized, because we are dealing with bytes and not bits. These units are used a lot in data storage, just check your “hard disk”, Pendrive, CD…
The abbreviated representation of the byte must always be capitalized, otherwise, the smallest unit is considered bit.
THE VELOCITY
As we are talking about the speed of communication of a device in the case the modens it is worth remembering that the units begin to take the ps in the end, which means by second. So this means that the speed of data transfer in modens is measured in megabits per second which is very different from megabyte per second.
Being measured in mega in megabits per second, none of the above modems or another with the capacity of 100 Mbps (megabits) will be able to transfer a file with the speed of 100 MBps (megabyte).
This is because 1 megabit is equivalent to 1000 kilobit, different from 1 megabyte which is equivalent to 1024 kilobyte, they are different units with different equivalences as expected. In the case above the maximum megabytes that these modems will reach is 12.5 MB, it seems sad but it is enough. You can use an online conversion to find out how much your modem will achieve.
There is no longer any reason to complain that your modem does not transfer 7MB files in a second, because in fact the 7Mbps modems are nothing but meager 875KBps in other words 0.875MBps.
WHAT OPERATORS SHOULD DO
Certainly the operators that provide access to the internet and that sell this equipment should try to clarify the user about these differences in order to avoid constraints that have always existed and they should also not make the mistake of abbreviating megabits in capital letters because this way it means megabyte, as this is the case in the figure below.
Errors like these must be corrected. But all is not bad, one of them was concerned with showing what Mbps means, it could be more explanatory but it is something.
Pay close attention to every detail of the products marketed by telephone operators in Angola if you want to be a happy customer.
