Internet Speed Unit Converter

Bits versus bytes

Internet providers sell speeds in megabits per second (Mbps). Browsers, download managers and app stores usually show megabytes per second (MB/s). One byte is eight bits, so the byte figure is always one eighth of the bit figure:

Watch the capitalisation: a lower-case b means bits, and an upper-case B means bytes.

What is MiB/s?

Network speeds use decimal units, where a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. Some software, including Windows, uses binary units, where a mebibyte (MiB) is 1,048,576 bytes. The difference is about 5%, enough to make a download look slightly slower in one program than another.

To see how long a particular file will take, try the download time calculator. To measure your real speed, run our speed test.