Bits vs. bytes — why 100 Mbit/s is only 12.5 MB/s
Internet providers advertise speed in bits per second (Mbit/s), but downloads and your file manager show bytes per second (MB/s). Because 1 byte is made of 8 bits, you divide the advertised bitrate by 8: a 100 Mbit/s line delivers at most 12.5 MB/s, and a 1 Gbit/s line at most 125 MB/s. The SI prefixes are decimal: 1 Mbit/s = 1000 kbit/s, 1 Gbit/s = 1000 Mbit/s. In practice protocol overhead makes the real rate a little lower.
Data-rate conversions are exact and rest on fixed factors — for more unit pairs, use our data rate conversion hub, and for file sizes (GB, MB, KB) the data storage conversion hub.