Terms

Megabit is a unit of measurement of the digital information, 10^6 or one million bits. Abbreviation is Mbit.

Megabyte is a unit of measurement of the digital information, 10^6 or one million bytes. Abbreviation is MB. Since 1 byte = 8 bit, 1 Megabyte = 8 Megabit, 1 Mbit = 0,125 MB.

Usage of the Megabit and Megabyte

Megabit is commonly used by the providers to indicate the data transfer rate of local networks and the Internet. For example, 100 Mbit/s (megabits per second) Fast Ethernet connection. The provider usually indicates the maximum allowable speed, but, in practice, the speed can change every second.

Megabytes are used to indicate the size of a file and its storage on the computers, removable media and cloud services. The reason for this is in the peculiarities of information processing. A bit is the smallest unit of measure for the digital information, each bit can be either zero or one.

Byte consists of eight bits, byte is the minimum amount of the memory that a computer can read and process. The byte is used to encode a single character of text in a computer. Since the files began to take up more and more memory, the file sizes are calculated in megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), terabytes (TB).

Limitations of the mobile operators’ plans are usually measured in GB.

Example 1

If the download speed is 20 Mbit/s, the file will be downloaded with a speed of 20/8=2.5 MByte/s. That is, a 25 MB file will be downloaded in 10 seconds with a speed of 20 Mbit/s.

Example 2

The speed is displayed in Mbit/s and MByte/s on the screenshot. 320.11/8=40.01. That is, with the speed of 320.11 Mbit/s, the file will be downloaded with a speed of 40.01 MByte/s.

Example 3

Let’s assume that the speed of the mobile operator is 20 Mbit/s. (20/8=2.5 MByte/s) and you need to download a 1 GB file (1024 MB). Thus, it will take 1024/2.5 = 409.6 seconds or approximately 7 minutes to download the file.