11–20 of 57 posts
How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?
Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?
Data is send serially over a fiber or copper line, bit by bit, not per byte. Also because bytes can be compressed, bits cannot, so giving the throughput in bits-per-second is an absolute value.
How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?
How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?
Even if the only reason is historical: why not, what advantage would bytes per second have?
By way of historical comparison, consider that in 1992, the ULCC's transatlantic "fat pipe" was a 1.5Mbps circuit: http://jam.ja.net/marketing/janet30years/images/gallery/grap... Or that the total traffic served by the University of Bath's website across all of 1997 was 63MB: https://wiki.bath.ac.uk/display/bucsha/Computing+Service+His...
Is... is that figure correct!? Conservatively, taking the number of requests at the start of the year, we get 6 million req/year. 63 1024 1024 == 66060288 bytes. 66060288/6000000 == ~110bytes/request. That seems too small. The overhead of the HTTP request alone (without content) would be greater than that!
In fact, you can find the server stats from back then: http://web.archive.org/web/19970822145424/http://www.bath.ac...
This says that it transferred "3 599 Mbytes" and there were "728 506" requests. Interpreting "3 599" as 3.599 gives 4.94 bytes per request, which is absurd. It must be 3.6 GB, making each response just under 5 kB. This seems much more reasonable.
So the number on that page should probably be interpreted as 63 GB, which is reasonable if we assume the site became more popular later in the year, as the original source suggests (3.6 GB*12 = 43.2 GB, and the stats are from May).
Also notice the following year (1998) says 126 MBytes and in 1999, 197 GB. That's an order of magnitude jump!
How come we're still using bits-per-second and not bytes-per-second? Any reason other than being historical at this point?
Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the only reason is historical: why not, what advantage would bytes per second have?
How long does it take to transfer a gigabyte file? Sure we can do the math but why (considering the average person)? Maybe there should be a common core revolution in engineering :-)
I don't how much I need to subtract for the multiple headers and other overhead, how fast the transfer rate gets to the maximum, how many packages get lost, what other factors of the congestion control algorithms might impact my transfer etc
"... underlines AMS-IX’s leading position within the global Internet Exchange Point market." Yeah, i.e. DE-CIX is constantly hitting the 4 Tbps barrier for quite some time now and is trending towards 5 Tbps. https://www.de-cix.net/about/statistics/
The Dutch are better at marketing, it seems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the size of a byte isn't fixed. It is hardware dependent. There is no definitive standard defining what the size of a byte is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
I would be surprised if, practically speaking, 8bits 1 byte for 99.99% of all general applications. My feeling is that the .01% can do the math so the other 99.99% don't have to.