(More on Bits and Bytes)
What is in this article?
- Recap
- Why are Networks in Bits and Data in Bytes?
- How to tell them apart?
Recap
The reason this article has the (More on Bits and Bytes) at the beginning of it is because I have covered Bits and Bytes previously in a section here. Check it out if you want the basics on 8 bits to a byte and so on. In a way it explains how it makes sense that we have 8 bits to a byte and so on. Sort of…
Why are Networks in Bit and Data in Bytes?
In a previous article on the OSI and TCP/IP Models I covered how Bits and Bytes work. In that article, I might have left the readers with an impression that data, when transferred from my computer to yours, is measured in Bytes/Second. So, a picture of a Cat that you downloaded from KittenWar.com would whip across all those routers and switches as Megabytes per second.
This, regretfully, is not the case. Well actually, it is, but it is not… Let me explain.
Bits, being either a 1 or a 0, are not very useful to represent data in any meaningful way because you only have two options there. That is why there are bytes, a collection as 8 bits. You of course know this already because you read my OSI articles where I talk about this (😊). So, data when stationary, say that cute cat picture, is better described in megabytes instead of megabits, because a byte represents a more meaningful section of the data then a collection of bits do.
To make this a bit (pun intended) clearer, say I sent you a text that read the following…
If we use the ASCII (There will be an article for what that is soon). Then we would know that each letter is made up of 8 bits or a single byte. In ASCII, each letter of the alphabet is represented by one of the numbers in the 255 options that bytes give us (capitals are represented by a different number then lowercase and spaces are a byte too).
So that simple message is made up of 168 bytes or 1344 bits. If I were to cut that off at 1300 bits instead then suddenly data goes missing or is changed and my message is different then what I sent. So, can we all agree that Bytes are a good way to store data?
Now the kicker comes in. Data when not at rest, say a text going through the internet letting you know that your Pizza Delivery guy is outside, is measure and referred to as Bits per second.
Wait, what!?! Why in the world would we do that? Well, the short answer is this, although data is far more useful in bytes, those bytes are transferred over the internet in 1s and 0s still (Bits). There is no getting around that, so we measure network speed in Bits per second instead of Bytes per second.
How do I tell the difference?
So how can you tell the difference between bits per second and bytes per second? After all both start with “B”.
Well luckily there is a way to tell. When you write Megabits per second you are supposed to write it Mbps and when you write Megabytes per second you would write is MBps. Same with all other levels of the data as well.