Bits, Bytes and Download Speeds

Posted by Scott McEachron on Tuesday, June 22, 2010 · Leave a Comment

According to Speedtest.net, the average download speed in North America is 7.46 Mbps or megaBITS per second (slightly more in the US). As there are 8 BITS in a BYTE, that’s 0.9325 megaBYTES or roughly 1 megabyte (Mb) per second. Therefore, it takes, on average, 1 second to download a 1 Mb file in North America.

There are 1000 megabytes (Mb) in a gigabyte (Gb). Therefore, it takes roughly 1000 seconds, or 16.67 minutes to download a 1Gb file.

Round that off to 15 minutes per Gb and the point should be clear: Be careful what you post online for download, speeds worldwide are roughly 1/7 that of speeds in North America…