# Our IT guy is claiming that our internet is 50 MBS
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [January 26, 2015, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930 "2015-01-26T16:39:10Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@cornopean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cornopean)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/1 "2015-01-26T16:39:10Z")
As I said above, our IT guy claims that our internet speed is 50 mbs. I asked him what MBS means. He said “megabytes per second”. Can it seriously be possible that we have such a thing. I’ve never heard of an internet this fast.
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/2 "2015-01-26T16:41:19Z")
> [@cornopean](#):
>
> As I said above, our IT guy claims that our internet speed is 50 mbs. I asked him what MBS means. He said “megabytes per second”. Can it seriously be possible that we have such a thing. I’ve never heard of an internet this fast.
I would assumed megabits per second, which is the normal way of expressing the speed of your connection. 50 Mbps is not unusual.
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/3 "2015-01-26T16:45:17Z")
Incidentally, South Korea has Internet speeds of up to a gigabit per second available to the home user. That’s the equivalent of 125 megabytes per second.
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### Author:  [@zoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zoid)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/4 "2015-01-26T16:50:31Z")
> [@pulykamell](#):
>
> I would assumed megabits per second, which is the normal way of expressing the speed of your connection. 50 Mbps is not unusual.
Agreed.
My crappy Comcast connection is 30 Mbps.
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### Author:  [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/5 "2015-01-26T16:50:36Z")
> [@cornopean](#):
>
> As I said above, our IT guy claims that our internet speed is 50 mbs. I asked him what MBS means. He said “megabytes per second”. Can it seriously be possible that we have such a thing. I’ve never heard of an internet this fast.
First of all, it’s megaBITS per second, not megaBYTES. And sure, it’s possible. 50Mbps service is available in lots of places.
Whether you’re actually getting that speed is another matter. 50 Mbps service is irrelevant if your modem or router are incapable of the same level of speed. It’s also the case that ISPs will be very cavalier about how they describe their speed of service - for instance, they may have 50 Mbps service that goes into an apartment building, and so can say it’s 50 Mbps, but since the bandwidth will now be broken up amongst many users no one of them is actually getting that speed.
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### Author:  [@cornopean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cornopean)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 5:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/6 "2015-01-26T17:02:29Z")
I explicitly asked whether it was megabits or megabytes. He insists it is “megabytes”.
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### Author:  [@sich\_hinaufwinden](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sich_hinaufwinden)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/7 "2015-01-26T17:03:38Z")
> [@pulykamell](#):
>
> Incidentally, South Korea has Internet speeds of up to a gigabit per second available to the home user. That’s the equivalent of 125 megabytes per second.
According to this article, gigabit or higher connections are available to 3% of the US.
> **[100Mbps Internet available to 59% of US, while gigabit still at just 3%](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/100mbps-internet-available-to-59-of-us-while-gigabit-still-at-just-3/)**
>
> At the other extreme, 2 percent of Americans can’t even get 3Mbps.
I recently got junk mail from Verizon offering up to 500 Mbps for a residential connection.
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### Author:  [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/8 "2015-01-26T17:11:07Z")
> [@sich\_hinaufwinden](#):
>
> According to this article, gigabit or higher connections are available to 3% of the US.
>
> [100Mbps Internet available to 59% of US, while gigabit still at just 3% - Ars Technica](http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/12/100mbps-internet-available-to-59-of-us-while-gigabit-still-at-just-3/)
>
> I recently got junk mail from Verizon offering up to 500 Mbps for a residential connection.
Wow.Seems like 50 Mbps through Comcast is as fast as I can find here in my Chicago neighborhood.
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### Author:  [@yoyodyne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yoyodyne)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/9 "2015-01-26T17:21:34Z")
Where I work we have multiple internet connections totaling 23 Gbps, or about 2900 MBps
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/10 "2015-01-26T17:28:34Z")
That’s probably also the total speed to your entire company. Everyone has to share that, so any individual employee will only get a fraction of it.
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### Author:  [@zoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zoid)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 5:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/11 "2015-01-26T17:36:12Z")
> [@cornopean](#):
>
> I explicitly asked whether it was megabits or megabytes. He insists it is “megabytes”.
Is he talking about the pipe coming into the facility or the speed the users can expect to see?
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### Author:  [@JKilez](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKilez)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/12 "2015-01-26T17:38:27Z")
> [@sich\_hinaufwinden](#):
>
> I recently got junk mail from Verizon offering up to 500 Mbps for a residential connection.
Where I am at, Time-Warner offers 300 Mbps and Google provides 1 Gbps. These are (relatively) inexpensive consumer-level services. A 50 MBps (400 Mbps) connection is in that same ballpark.
> [@yoyodyne](#):
>
> Where I work we have multiple internet connections totaling 23 Gbps, or about 2900 MBps
This is more in line with what I would expect from a company. The OP should ask the IT guy why they have such a small pipe.
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### Author:  [@troub](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/troub)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/13 "2015-01-26T22:01:45Z")
There’s no context here? Does OP work in a hot dog shop and the “IT guy” is a high school kid, or is it a small-ish design shop, or doctor’s office building, or university campus, or…
Anyway, 400 Mbps (50 MBps) is absolutely within the realm of most ISPs business-class offerings (the one the cable company would sell to a small business, or even a home user if they wanted to pay for it). A larger business or campus might have total bandwidth on the order of many times this, though an individual building/network segment/etc. on that campus will only get a small part of it.
That said, I have met many “IT guy”-type colleagues who, seriously, don’t know the difference or get confused between Mbps and MBps themselves. Especially the guy who comes to your desk to reboot/fix your computer, if he’s not the same guy that fixes the network switches.
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### Author:  [@Kiwi\_Fruit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kiwi_Fruit)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/14 "2015-01-26T22:14:22Z")
IT guys are mysteriously afflicted with a problem with words and conveying accurate information to people. Data bandwidth/speed should always be quoted in bits per second (with the appropriate multiplier of course). As a tech support engineer for a network company, I know that that is what the company supplies. A given speed in (mega/giga) bits per second.
The only place he should be using bytes in his words to people is talking about memory or storage capacity, never speed.
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/15 "2015-01-26T22:32:13Z")
Dialogs and status bars might report data transfer speeds in byte multiples per second, but I concur that the guy described here is almost certainly just wrong (unless the speed is actually 400Mbps and he’s converted it just to be contrary)
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### Author:  [@TroutMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TroutMan)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2015, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/16 "2015-01-26T23:10:23Z")
I call BS. It’s possible you are getting 50 MBps (bytes), but in that case he’d have said it was 400 Mbps (bits). No one expresses bandwidth in bytes.
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### Author:  [@Dr.Strangelove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Strangelove)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2015, 1:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/17 "2015-01-27T01:35:47Z")
> [@Kiwi\_Fruit](#):
>
> A given speed in (mega/giga) bits per second.
Furthermore, mega means 10[sup]6[/sup] and giga means 10[sup]9[/sup]. Not 2[sup]20[/sup] or 2[sup]30[/sup] as with computer memory.
My work computer is limited by the speed of its network card, so ~900 Mb/s (there’s always some overhead). I’m sure it would be much faster with a 10 Gb/s adapter.
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### Author:  [@boffking](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/boffking)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2015, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/18 "2015-01-27T03:00:19Z")
Could he be talking about a LAN speed? They are usually much faster than WAN or internet speeds.
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### Author:  [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2015, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/19 "2015-01-27T03:06:16Z")
I live in a fairly rural section of eastern Connecticut, and am getting about 125 Mbps download speed through Comcast (according to the speed test I just ran).
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### Author:  [@Saint\_Cad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Cad)
#### Post date: [January 27, 2015, 3:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-it-guy-is-claiming-that-our-internet-is-50-mbs/710930/20 "2015-01-27T03:54:16Z")
Was his first modem 300 bytes per second (wait for it …)
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