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Phones & Disks – Bits and Bytes

There is some confusion arising from the use of Bits and Bytes, specially in the context of computers (disks) and Data Communication (phones). We try to provide some clarification here.

A bit is shorthand for binary digit which comes from the binary code. Computers represent data and instructions with the binary system because it suits the chips used to build them. The binary number system uses only the digits 0 and the 1; it is also called base 2. At school we learn to count by using the numbers 0 to 9 which is called the decimal system or base 10.

The abbreviation for a bit is a lower case b.

A Byte is a series of 8 bits. A byte is also called an octet .

The abbreviation for a Byte is an upper case B.
The abbreviation for an octet is a lower case o.

In computer jargon, bits and bytes have different uses.

Data communication uses bits per second (bps) to measure the speed of data.
For example, Mobile phones service providers use bps to quote upload and download speeds.

Disk and computer memory use Bytes to measure their capacity.
For example PC manufacturers  quote disk size in Bytes.

Because computers work at very high speed and with massive storage capacity, prefixes are used to manipulate these large numbers. The prefixes are:

On the disk of my PC, this page takes 15 KB. Fifteen kilobytes of storage from the 186 gigaoctets (Go) available.

I can send it to you at a speed of around 1Mbps. A speed of one megabits per second.

The main confusion comes from the fact that bits are sometimes represented with an upper case B, bits and Bytes sound alike and Bytes is sometimes used to quote data communications speed.

To a lesser extent, some confusion also exists because the customary prefixes often stand for rounded numbers. So K is often used as an abbreviation for thousand, dropping 24 and Mega stand for Million, losing over 48,576 .

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