Kilobit

Kilobit

Kilobit: a unit of measurement equal to 1000 bits.

Kilo is the SI standard prefix for one thousand, or 〖10〗^3. While it follows the SI metric pattern in terms of being 1000 times the size of the previous term, it is not interchangeable with Kilobyte, because it is one- eighth the size of the KB.

Therefore it is an uneven conversion, and the switching of the two will cause considerable issues in terms of actual capacity.

Until the widespread use of broadband internet, internet speeds were often measured in kilobits per second. Think 28.8K and 56K modems.

For a time, these were the fast internet speeds.  However, most modern internet service provider (ISP’s) now have connection speeds in excess of 10 Mbps (megabytes per second).

These speeds have rendered the kbps rates virtually extinct, save for those moment when the connection is backed up or when connecting to a server with less bandwidth.

In these cases- if the connection speed drops below 1 Mbps, the speeds will register in the Kbps range.

Note that While kilobits are used to measure dtr (data transfer rates), kilobytes are used to measure file size.

Therefore, if you download an 800 KB file at 400 Kbps, it will take 16 seconds, not 2. This is because 400 kilobits per second is equal to 50 kilobytes per second.

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