following my question from message 45997: my home 500 bt adsl line is downloading at 570,000 kbps, does that mean i'm downloading approx 57k per second?

No, it means 570kbps, (kilo bits per seconds). Not to be confused with 57KBps which is kilo BYTES per second. 1,000 bits = 1 kilo byte, (appx.) lower case b = bits, upper case B = bytes, usually. Most data transfer is reffered to as bit speed, but people mix them up all the time.

There are 8 bits in a byte!!! so 1000 bits = 1 kilo bit, not 1 kilo byte as you said Rick! Infact 1000 bits = 125 bytes! 1 kilo byte = 1024 bytes...just remember there are 8 bits to a byte and you should be OK! As for your ADSL line, you will have to look at your ratio of uploads to downloads, but I would guess that your download speed is 500Kbps (judging by the name of your contract!). You may then divide that number by 8 which should mean you are actually downloading at 62.5 KB/s (Kilo bytes / second)...with a following wind and a lot of luck. If on the other hand you really are downloading at 570'000 Kbps, that would equate to 71'250 Kilo Bytes per second....to put that in real terms, that is approx. 101 full DivX movies per second or approx. 1187 full albums per second....which would be nice! :o) Anyway...as you can probably tell, I am finding any excuse to put off my work...so I'm off now...take it easy!

Oh...if you are wondering why 1 Kilo byte equals 1024 bytes, we have the damn computer people to blame, as they decided to ignore the SI units (decimal or base 10) and use base 2 (or binary)....I cant see why...perhaps a marketing ploy in the retail of memory...ahem :o) Ciao...

It's not in decimal because a bit is binary, 8 bits =1 byte 2(to the)8 = 1024 bits Computers are digital- 1 or 0 -> binary

Yeh...I know its binary, but according to SI units, it shouldn't really be called kilo, or mega, as these are defined as decimal units. As i said, referring to binary numbers in terms of kilo and mega isnt really correct, its a bit like calling a second a second even if it is made up of 52 milli seconds. Basically, computer people are defining their own boundaries that go against the whole idea of standard units! Mental!!

I can see that there are people with WAY too much time on their hands than me. Make a simple math error and WHAM, ya get slammed. But as you can see from all the above, bits, bytes, download speed, it don't matter. It's just a scale for you to judge how fast one ISP or piece of hardware is over the other, it could have been a scale based on anything really.