After 4 years of studying about computers and their science, after writing exams for 56 subjects, after attending 200+ lab sessions, after building stuff for the web, today I was mortified for a moment, full of embarrassment.
I got a new broadband connection, our ISP provided 100Mbps unlimited for a month, which is more than enough for me. Today I was downloading Fifa, the torrent application was downloading it really slowly, I knew there is something up with the application's setting, I googled got a few answers and changed the settings and the speed went up drastically.
It increased from 2.1 to 8MBps, I changed the download speed to unlimited, so I expected it to be around 70 at least since the ISP is giving me 100Mbps, then I decided to look it up, and the next google search made me question my 4 years of Computer Science and Engineering. The answer that I read made me feel so embarrassed for not knowing the difference between Mbps and MBps .
My internet speed was displayed in Mega "bits" per second, and my download speed was in Mega "Bytes" per second, this small difference of 8bits was enough for me to question my education, I am glad that my father doesn't read this blog. All I had to do was multiply my download speed with 8, (1 bit = 8 Bytes), which gave me around 70Mbps of download speed, which was reasonable, and websites displaying MBps for applications is also a nice thing because we measure the app size in MB and GB's, but ISP's showing their internet speed in Megabits per sec. is a very cunning move.
I sat and pondered upon my past, about how can someone not know this, all this time, I felt that there is just one metric to calculate internet speed, It was a distressing feeling, this is something which must have been taught in the introductory classes and I probably slept thru it, anyhow, now I knew the difference and realised this could be some blog content, so then thought how to over exaggerate this stuff.
