Originally Posted by Kushan
Connection speeds, be they wireless, ethernet or internet connection speeds (DSL or cable, doesn't matter) are measured in bits per second. So you have 1024 bits which is 1 kilobit (or kbit). 1024 kbit gives you 1Mbit and 1024Mbit gives you 1Gbit.
However, files on your computer are measured in Bytes . This is where the confusion sets in.
To get from bits to bytes, you just divide by 8 but the confusion comes from knowing when to do it.
If you see Mbit, this always means Megabit.
If you see MB, it's generally assumed that the capital B means Bytes.
The confusion is if someone writes "Mb". This is supposed to mean Megabit due to the lower case b, but sometimes people write that to mean Megabyte. The general idea is if they're talking about connection speeds, they mean megabit but if they're talking about file sizes they meant Mega Bytes.
Mbps stands for "Mega bits per second" and if you see this, you can always divide by 8 to get the Mega Bytes per second.
The part that causes a lot of confusion is if you're downloading a file. Is your download speed in Megabits because you're downloading it over the internet, or MegaBytes because it's a file? Most software go by the latter - so uTorrent, Firefox, Chrome, IE, etc. will generally show Mega Bytes.
Speed tests, because they're showing your connection speed, show Mega bits.
Sky's ADSL is "up to" 20Mbit. In Bytes, that's about 2.5MB/s but obviously your connection is much less than this (your connection is at about 9Mbit, or just over 1MByte per second).
When you plug an ethernet cable in, you'll get 100Mbit to your router but the internet connection speed is still only 20Mbit (or 9Mbit in your case).
When you get the new Superhub and connect your PC directly to it, you might actually see the connection listed at 1.0Gbps. I say "might" because it relies on your computer having a gigabit Ethernet port. If it's less than about 10 years old, it probably does. However, this is still only the connection to the hub, the actual internet connection will be lower (120meg in your case, I believe).
Hope that clears things up!
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