Source Jockey

I just got off the phone with an AT&T salesman.  He called to let us know about the new UVERSE service available for the house.  I didn’t really care (I’m happy with our internet service for the most part), but I was curious to see what they were offering.

Me: “How fast is this connection speed?”
Him: “It’s 6 megabytes per second”
Me: “Holy shit, that’s fast!”
Him: “I know sir, it’s amazing.”
Me: “Are you sure it’s not megaBITS per second?”
Him: “Yes sir, it’s 6 megaBYTES per second.  I see it right here on my screen.”
Me: “Does it say megabytes spelled out? Or is it just the letters?”
Him: “It says ’6mbs’
Me: ” Is it a lower or upper-case ‘b’?”
Him: “It’s lower case.”
Me:  ”That means megaBITs.  That means it’s three-quarters of a megaBYTE per second.”
Him: “Oh.  Whatever.”

So there’s some importance to this…  A BYTE is made up of 8 BITS.  So the difference between a bit and a byte is eight-fold!

Why do you care?  If your internet company is advertising a connection of 18 megabytes per second…they really mean megabits, and therefore 2.25 megabytes per second.

Don’t get fooled by a salesman’s stupidity.

I think they SHOULD advertise by megabytes per second–it makes more sense–most normal people don’t know the difference between a bit or a byte.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 5:35 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.