system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is bandwidth measured in BITS when everything else people are familiar with is measured in BYTES?

Is there a good reason why connection speed is measured in megaBITS per second while nearly everything else consumers are familiar with is measured in megaBYTES or gigaBYTES?

I can't see any good reason for this other than to mislead less knowledgable consumers (which is going to be 90% of the population when it comes to technology)

The only other (lame) excuse I can think of is maybe this shit started in the days of dial-up modems. Even if that's so, doesn't it seem like maybe it's time to change to a measurement that would actually be relevant to most people?
gpt
Actually it is because the focus of the two technologies is completely different. Transmission is bit by bit, there may be grouping of bits for error checking reasons, but otherwise each bit has to be sent individually. In contrast memory and storage need to be indexed, by grouping bits of 8 into a byte, you gain significant improvements in performance and reduced cost.

So bandwidth is actually sending bits, so focuses on bits, storage is indexed by bytes, so is measured in bytes.