system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do they measure internet speeds in megabit/s and gigabit/s instead of megabyte/s and gigabyte/s?
gpt
Bytes have no meaning for serial data transfer. First of all, the data is sent one bit at a time. Also, not all of the bits are data - some of them are control information and not always in 8 bit blocks. The control information is usually something like "here comes some data, get ready!". There is no way to measure the bytes per second transferred. The bits per second measurement of digital bandwidth makes sense, because it allows you to compare it against other network media accurately. Throughput (or "goodput") is usually measured in bytes per second - that's the measurement of download and upload speed. Why isn't that measured in bits? Because you can't store one bit at a time in a file - it takes a byte to store one bit, so all files are in bytes.