Along the way, our home office setups and equipment have evolved, but our internet connections remain the cornerstone of our ability to safely learn, work and connect with others.

The pandemic brought about an unprecedented number of people learning and working from home, for better or worse. So,В while weвЂ™ll likely always measure speed in bits and data volume in bytes, the consistency and speedВ at which those bits are delivered over the internet will surely rise.Importance of upload speeds amid the pandemic Regardless ofВ whether itвЂ™s necessary today, ISPs are preparing their networks for the needs of the future. In that environment, speed requirements are going to increase. ThatвЂ™s 1 billion bits per second! Not everyone needs this much speed todayВ (Netflix reports that a connection speed of 25 Megabits per second is all thatвЂ™s required to streamВ Ultra HD content), but cable ISPs see a future of virtual reality, telehealth, driverless cars, andВ an internet of things. Today, many cable ISPs are capable of delivering internet speeds over 1В Gigabit per second. And though speed fluctuates, a recent FCC reportВ shows that when averaged over a set period of time,В cable ISPs deliver at or above advertised internet speeds (as shown in the graphic below). The bits of data that make up that email from grandma can arrive in any order as long asВ the email client arranges them properly once they arrive. Speed and bit-delivery order may fluctuate basedВ on time of day, the number of users in your region, and the type of information youвЂ™re requesting.В Streaming movies, for example, requires data be delivered in a specific order. ItвЂ™s worth noting that regardless of the measurement unit, data transferred over theВ internet doesnвЂ™t move at a perfectly smooth rate. In theory, it would take approximatelyВ 8 seconds to transfer a file that was 100 megabytes (quite often referred to as MBs) inВ size. It is essential to pay close attention to theВ magnitude of the file that you are downloading or uploading. Most cable ISPs offer consumers 100 megabits per secondВ (quite often referred to as Mbps) internet speeds. And because those bits sometimes come out of order and from different serverВ locations, itвЂ™s both more accurate and more intuitive to measure speed as a factor of the number ofВ bits per second that an internet connection is capable of transmitting, not the total number ofВ memory units, or bytes, it transmits. In otherВ words, the number of bytes.ДЄs to why we measure internet speed in bits even though theВ internet delivers bytes of data, it is because the internet delivers those bytes of data as singleВ bits at a time. So when we measure the volume of information capable of being contained on, say,В a hard drive, it makes sense to measure this as the total amount of memory available. This is because historically, 8 bits are needed to encode a singleВ character of text. A byte on the other hand is a unit of memory thatВ usually contains 8 bits. ItвЂ™s essentially a single binary dataВ point either yes or no, on or off, up or down.

A bit is the smallest unit of computer information. Have you ever wondered why internet speedВ is measured in bits per second, but the data itself is measured in bytes? Why is this? WouldnвЂ™t itВ make more sense if we used the same unit of measurement for both data speed and dataВ volume?ДЇor those unfamiliar with the fundamentals of data measurement, this post outlinesВ the distinct differences between bits and bytes to clear up some of the confusion surrounding thisВ concept.

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