I don't think this has been posted about before and this is my first thread. Move it if necessary..

I just wanted to clear up the misconception that some people have with the deals they get from their internet service providers. A lot of people are disappointed and confused with their download/upload speeds, here is an answer to your queries. For some people in many different regions, a lot of the ISPs out there like to offer you incredible deals at what seem to be reasonable prices; but in truth!!! They're offering you only a small partisan deal, in comparison to other ISPs or low priced offerings.

Example:

Megabytes Per Second and MBPS is a lovely term/acronym to throw around in the industry. A Megabyte is approx. 1001-1024 kilobytes, depending upon who you ask.

Unknown to a lot of random internet-going folk, there is another term that has the exact same acronym, which in turn is used in a place where you would normally expect to find Megabytes Per Second.

The term I speak of is; Megabits Per Second
What is a Megabit, you ask.. A Megabit is NOT the same as a Megabyte; do not be fooled. A Megabit in comparison to a Megabyte, would be about 1/8th the size of a megabyte or roughly 125 kilobytes.

When some (most) ISPs place adds and offer deals, they give out a number such as 1, following is the acronym MBPS or MBS. Generally, you would believe this to mean Megabytes Per Second. But in most cases, it does not. If you receive a great deal on a 1mbps down speed, consider asking the provider if that is in megabits or megabytes. You will thank yourself later and save on lot of confusion/frustration at your speeds.

Just a little tip from me to you!

Let the people know! False advertising is no bueno and a lot of people never learn this. It causes havoc and I've seen it up close and personal. lol (long awkward self bump)

This is so full of inaccuracies I hardly know where to begin.

1. A megabyte is exactly 1024 kilobytes

2. A megabit is exactly 1/8 of a megabyte and therefore exactly 128 kilobytes.

3. The acronyms can be confusing, but they are nor exactly the same: Megabyte per second is shortened to MBps or MB/s and Megabit per second is shortened to Mbps or Mb/s. In the US and in the EU ISPs are legally bound to use the correct acronym.

4. That users don't get the connection speed they seemingly signed up for has primarily to do with them being poorly informed. They should do a little research.

5. ISPs usually advertise that they can deliver speeds up to a certain limit, because they can not guarantee the full bandwidth. This has to do with the number of subscribers they have to hook up to a single DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer), signal degradation based on the distance between the household and the nearest DSLAM and the simple fact that a lot of smaller ISPs have to share bandwidth with larger ISPs they buy their bandwidth and number of subscriber ports from.

6. So, this is not really false advertising but user ignorance.

I hope that cleared that up.

Yep Yep. And I am a lucky sob. The DSLAM is right on the corner of my yard and only one other house is hooked to it. I get slightly over what my company's upto rate is and nearly double the minimum guaranteed.

Bang on, 100% correct, maybe Taunchi2825 was providing a perfect example of how easy it is to confuse & mislead users?
If that is the case, congratulations are in order.
(What would we do without our great Translators?)

It's not just ISPs, in every field we use Mega or Gigabits per second rather than Mega or Gigabytes per second. For example: speed of SATA III is 6 gbps where gb stands for gigabit and speed of thunderbolt is 10 gbps similarly.

How can you say my thread is full of inaccuracies when you state the exact same information that I had posted? Are you on crack or something? When the average person reads mbps, they can easily mistake it for megabytes per second when it actually means megabits per second.. Them mistaking it because they were 'poorly informed' as you say is the whole f&%*ing reason I made this thread. I've seen so many people fuss about how they don't get the speeds they payed for and that is the reason. Why did you even post in my helpful and fully factual thread anyway? No trolls allowed. Frankly.. You're a moron. And the rest of you that agreed with him obviously didn't even read what I wrote. Jesus, sheep much?

He never wrote exactly what you wrote, he corrected it:
1: YOU - 1001-1024 HIM - 1024
2: YOU - 125 HIM - 128
3: YOU - only use MB/ps HIM - use both MB/ps and Mb/ps
5: YOU - false advertising HIM - law-bound descriptions of their service

I was disregarding the few kilobyte difference. A megabit is 125 kilobytes. The size of the megabyte has been debated since the word was created. ISPs do not always capitalize their acronyms properly and it doesn't matter because the point of the article was the misunderstanding of it as the letters m-b-p-s.. Which can easily be confused. I have witnessed false advertising in person as my mother was receiving her installation, as well as a lot of other friends and relatives. Where in, the representative offering the installation mislead them and told them they were receiving MEGABYTES not MEGABITS.. It is more often that a person is frustrated and CONFUSED about the speeds they received because of the misunderstanding that come from the acronym mbps, whether or not it is properly capitalized and along with misinformation from the ISP. It happens. I didn't include the rest because that's not what this thread was about. It was about the specificity of the misconception on mbps and how it relates to poor speeds. That is all.

A subscriber is told whether it's megabits or megabytes, if people don't notice that, it's not the fault of the ISP