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The internet needs to be classified as a utility, living without it is just not possible in the world we have created.
I remember the collective shitfit around a decade ago when Obama give out free cell phones to homeless people. It was such a crazy concept to people who have never struggled that yes, you DO need a smartphone to meet your calling, banking and personal management needs. Everything has an online portal. Every job application requires an online portion. It’s how the world works and has worked since the mid 00s.
Ah yes “Obamaphones”
Ring ring ring ring ring … Obamaphone!
Remember that time Obama realized they were never going to approve any Supreme Court pick of his so he suggested “Ben Ghazi” for the job as a joke?
That was funny
Wait. What?! Obama gave out phones? I was living abroad for the first few years of the Obama administration when smart phones happened. Can you fill me in on this one?
BuT yOu CaN aLwAyS gO tO tHe LiBrArY
The libraries that many of the people who say this are trying to shutter, of course.
The libraries that will allow me a maximum of an hour, maybe two if I’m lucky?
It was until Ajit Pai unraveled that.
Should be 1gbps asymmetric now, with a near future goal of 1gbps symmetric.
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I really wish symmetric broadband was standard. Having 500 down (as a homelabber especially) means nothing if you have only 25 up 😭
Same boat here with Comcast. I would gladly give up some of the 800Mbps download to increase the 12Mbps upload speed I’m getting.
800Mbps*
*with SPEEDBOOST! (We throttle lawl)
We don’t throttle to our company-owned Speedtest servers though so we can disprove you when claiming we are not offering you peak speeds.
DOCSIS 4.0 makes that a reality. Your connection will reallocate your available bandwidth between upload and download dynamically as needed.
Homelabber here, stuck in Comcast hell with 10Mbps upload.
I wish I could afford to bring the local municipal fiber to my house, but to go like 2 city blocks with it would be tens of thousands of dollars. :(
I’m considering a local colocation/ datacenter to move my homelab to. But then it wouldn’t be a homelab anymore
maybe you could last mile it with microwave point to point?
Would need to convince a local business down there to support it, but it’s not a terrible idea.
But it is a terrible situation that this is the length people need to go to to work around Comcast / DOCSIS lopsided networking.
How much is Comcast charging you compared to the fiber? If I were in that position I would have decided differently (assuming I owned the property) as the difference for me peaked at $150/mo. Even more if I chose a slightly cheaper plan…and I have AT%T fiber, not municipal.
Spectrum? I’ve got the same plan. Sucks because I have trouble streaming my Plex server outside of my apartment. And when I work from home uploads take forever.
Was definitely a big factor in going from Comcast to ATT (symmetric)in my area. Although Comcast has gotten faster too.
The asymmetrical aspect of cable will be here to stay. Fiber can do it because it was build on a different foundation.
Copper cable transmits data using electric signals in various frequencies. There are a batch of frequencies reserved for phone and TV. ALL of the tv programming is constantly streamed to your lines whether you have TV or not and whether you pay for it or not. It’s encrypted and is only decrypted by your cable boxes when your provider says they can decrypt it. The phone frequencies are reserved so you can make phone calls and still max out your download.
So what about the rest of the bandwidth? Well, way back in the early days of cable it was pretty much everyone for themselves. Every company did things its own way. That’s where DOCSIS came in. It’s a platform that allows modem manufacturers to make modems that will work on any cable network that supports Docsis. And the key part is that DOCSIS is always backwards compatible. The network upgrade to 3.1 did not break the old d2 devices.
When it was developed the download was extremely more necessary than the upload. You’d be sending small single line commands on upload and receiving entire files in download. So more frequencies went to download than upload. In a lab setting 1.0 could reach 40mbps down and 10 up. That’s not what was sold because real life isn’t a lab and there’s loss over large distances. Realistically most people got 10 mb down and upload wasn’t even listed.
Whats changed? Well today those same download and upload frequencies are still used. We’ve added more around them to deliver higher speeds. But we’ve also kept the same principles that people need more download than upload. Docsis 3.1 was released in 2013. We really didn’t start stressing over upload until Covid and work from home had us on zoom calls all day.
Docsis 4.0 is technically released but requires quite a bit of overhaul to work with existing networks. We pretty much need to do away with cable tv. That’s why many ISP’s are pushing IPTv. It removes the need for all that bandwidth devoted to just TV. If everyone in a region drops traditional cable for IPTv they can easily switch to d4. D4 does increase upload but does not make it symmetrical.
Your cable company does not decide their highest tier realistically. It’s the most that medium will offer. It’s gonna be a while too for d4 to be available everywhere. Everyone would need to drop traditional cable (which is honestly a nice move regardless) and people don’t upgrade plans very often. When I worked in tech support I would frequently deal with customers complaining about slow speeds while on plans from 2002.
They could drop the 200 or so channels that no one fucking watches and use that spectrum for more channels for cable internet upstream. It’s entirely possible, with today’s tech. Uploads were chopped down to nothing for the simple reason that people were using that bandwidth in the early days to share pirated material.
The technology is there, but we need to free up that space. Cable companies don’t just do things to their own beat. Cable Labs is the one responsible for organizing how that bandwidth is used and removing the cable frequencies to open up more internet frequencies is literally the next step.
But you need to do entire markets at a time. We can’t just upgrade the people that move to IP tv because at a certain point they share lines with people who haven’t upgraded so that bandwidth is already used.
Everyone needs to upgrade in an area to allow the business to reallocate that bandwidth. What you described is literally what is in progress right now. It just takes time
False. Comcast is finally caving and is beginning to roll out 2 gig symmetrical https://www.engadget.com/comcast-starts-squeezing-2-gbps-symmetrical-internet-speeds-through-decades-old-coaxial-cables-143657830.html
That’s just because they’re not maxing the download. They could push a few a few more gigs download in the same package but that’s close to the cap for upload. That’s like a provider being capable of 1G down and 50 meg up offering a 50 down and up plan. Just marketing is all that is
No, you’re moving the goal post. A company like Comcast offering a symmetrical service is huge, regardless of what the underlying technology is capable of. They could have been offering 200 megs symmetrical with Docsis 3.0, but they didn’t. They restricted customers to 11mbit uploads. This is a big deal
Except they literally couldn’t? Official documentation for 3.0 is 100 up and 1G down in a lab setting. As someone who’s actually tested that with an ISP it doesn’t work in the real world. 500/50 was what was achievable in most cases. Then 3.1 pushed the download with OFDM splits, but practical applications still couldn’t hit the 1G they got in lab environments. 3.0 was never advertised to hit 200 up and 3.1 hasn’t actually hit it in real world. 4.0 will get us closer to symmetrical max.
I will say that Comcast being the biggest ISP does likely mean they’ll reach true d4 first but to my knowledge they haven’t achieved it yet.
Great info, thanks.
You get a terabyte cap? Jfc, where I live it’s like a few gigs, and that can cost into the hundreds for maybe 25.
You guys have caps? Jfc, how do you pirate 3TB a month in pure spite of the hegemony of current year capitalism?
I shouldn’t be too cocky though, I have a 40GB cap. On my phone. 😢
Ultrabased
War walking.
Yeah states with Comcast caps you at 1.2TB unless you pay $50 for the unlimited plan, which I don’t think is even offered everywhere. They discount it to $30 if you use their modem.
Mine is $30/mo for unlimited (on top of my plan cost) with my own modem.
Luckily there’s a few FTTH companies that are almost done laying fiber in my area. I’m finally giving comcast the boot.
I had to get a fucking business plan to not deal with this BS. Still never got half the speed I’m paying for. The only other option is $100 for DSL.
It’s $20 for unlimited here with Comcast, or the business plan which is actually less right now for some reason for the same speeds.
AT&T is unlimited with their gigabit plans or faster. Maybe their 300mbps plan too (heck I guess I’m not sure they have any caps at the moment come to think of it).
It does look like the prices changed recently. I have 2 houses currently with similar plans. My currently living in house is using the Xfinity modem and costs $25 /m but I guess that’s the modem and the unlimited so not too bad.
My other house has my own network system and not using any Comcast hardware and that one is $30/m.
The bad part for me was until recently they refused to give me unlimited (when it cost $50) and I wasn’t able to get it for a while. It just wouldn’t go through. I got my fair share of overage charges cause of it. I’m sure if I spent enough time bitching at support I could get something from it but I don’t have it in me to do that lol
How much do they charge you to use their modem?
They recently changed the prices. It’s $30 extra with your own modem or free of you use theirs since they’ll also use it to supply others with free ‘hot spots’ and cellular service.
Cellular hotspot with a Comcast modem, really?
I guess not technically cellular bands but wifi coverage to supplement the mobile phone service they offer now.
Uhhh, how does that work? I’m hoping separate passwords!
Yes, it’s a different SSID on an isolated network.
Comcast has been doing this for over a decade I believe. By default their routers advertise a hotspot exclusive to other Comcast subscribers. Not sure the security behind it since it’s not technically a password just authenticate via your Comcast account. But I agree it is crazy lol I had a similar reaction when I first found out.
My isp used to offer 10mbps up for like a decade, they have recently downgraded it to 5mbps for new subscribers. I’ve uploaded a few things with it and it’s extremely slow. If it wasn’t that I’m only paying $40 for 1gbps down, I’d have switched.
~500Kb/s. Yay…
All right I have 1000 seconds of internet, what a deal
Things with caps aren’t terrestrial broadband. You can have caps on cell based networks and still be considered broadband. One of the biggest issues is it companies like Comcast and AT&t will offer broadband service in an area but not necessarily offer only broadband service or not let you buy broadband service about also having their TV. And then they claim they’re serving the area because they have broadband speeds or you can pay a bunch of money to have your service uncapped but that’s not really the point of having a broadband connection available in the area.
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Comcast has broadband speed plans. They also charge you an extra $30 if you don’t have a TV bundle and then give you an actual broadband plan that’s unlimited. They have also been throwing the unlimited data and router and security bs in more competitive areas but that’s not a nationwide product.
I literally can’t do half of what I want to do online efficiently or in a timely manner because I can barely crack 10 up. I do video work on the side. Takes hours if not days for me to upload something. Even pictures nowadays. Great I’ve got a DSLR for a phone and I can shoot raw. Takes 5 mins to upload a pic.
Worse, they do that crap for my business account. Great for the vpn to the office.
It’s normal for businesses to pay for peak and total bandwidth. That’s one of the reasons why they guarantee speed and availability and should be refunding you if they don’t meet those.
If the federal government is regulating them can we admit they’re a fucking utility already and stop allowing them to gouge prices when they have more money than they could feasibly spend?
Can you imagine if we said “by 2035 every American household in our electric grid will also be connected to the internet at a speed of 1gbps”?
I can imagine it.
I can imagine the next jerk off administration rescinding that goal in the name of private enterprise or whatever bullshit excuse they choose.
We did that in the 90s. We gave ISPs billions to deploy fiber everywhere. It was mostly squandered and 25 years later most Americans still don’t have fiber access.
Well, we didn’t. It wasn’t a utility. Utilities are more regulated by the govt. Thats a big part of why it failed and why electricity succeeded with the same effort in the fucking 1800s.
Does this really matter. We aren’t getting it anyway.
The telcom/cable companies are just going to take the “broadband” money, build out a couple of neighborhoods, claim it is too hard, and then keep all the money.
They have already done it many times. Free taxpayer money with zero repercussions. Why would they do anything different.
I have a lot of experience with rural broadband initiatives, and generally yes, the FCC designation sets the minimums we see in terms of new service delivery to underserved communities. I specifically worked with state and municipal entities to build grant packages to fund infrastructure and these new minimums would be a great help.
We are between towns in western WA state stuck with 10Mb DSL service. There are a lot of us folks. After moving in (the PO said the internet was great, lol), we discovered that doing anything excessive like downloading AND streaming would not work. One thing at a time. We were able to bond two pair and get 20Mb which is workable, but that’s where we sit. Gigabit service is all around us, but we’d have to trench a mile up the road and pay for that to even think about getting a provider to lay a line. Century Link outright laughed at me.
I was able to get T-Mo’s home internet as a backup since we WFH, but it isn’t stellar either.
I live in rural Washington too, in the mountains. There was a local ISP that was terrible and amazingly a very small ISP bought them out from Arizona. The first thing they did was start to run fiber to anyone who wanted it. I went from shit DSL to 1gig up and 1 gig down fiber. To top it all off, they’ve lowered my monthly price once and doubled my bandwidth once… Without even asking, I even emailed them to check if my bill was lower and speed was faster and they were like yep! Mind blown.
Small world, but I helped form many of the broadband action teams in Washington State, and consulted on the broadband plans for each country that was submitted for federal funding. We’re getting there, slowly, but progress is being made.
My coworkers mom lives in the same general area and has been using Starlink for a while now without issue. She gets around 300Mbps.
I considered it, but it isn’t good for online gaming and then there is…Musk. Had to pass.
~20ms ping times are perfectly fine for gaming. Admit it, it’s just Musk.
Should that not be enough? There is also the equipment costs and personally my gaming days are waning anyway. When I visit someone with Starkink and use it, it seems very frequently laggy. Bursts seemed common.
I use scheduling/throttling to accommodate this meager link speed. I was on dial-up well into the early 2000’s, so I am no stranger to suffering slow links where patience is key.
Western MT here. Starlink is consistently 100+
We really need some upstream minimums as well. That causes so much lag for me. Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down. I have a 200/10 plan now and it’s difficult to do work with the maybe 5 that I get in practice if I’m lucky, especially after overhead from VPN.
Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down
That can’t be right. I thought Australia’s 100/20 plans had pathetic upload speeds but that’s unreal.
Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn’t buy because everyone streams now.
I have Spectrum here in the southeast of the United States. My plan is 300 down 12 up. That pathetic upload speed needs to change for the better.
Here in Sweden most people have optic fiber with AT LEAST 100/100 speeds. You gotta try if you want lower than that / if you want asymmetrical speeds.
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Right now in a lot of states Verizon has a monopoly on symmetrical internet service. I can’t ever switch ISPs because I can’t get 400/400 anywhere else.
God I wish we had that here. We are pretty much stuck with Comcast as the only option in many places since they were granted a monopoly for so long and the phone company never really expanded much. DSL is too slow in most places. Like I think I can only get 100/1 where I am now, but the last place I was at which was not exactly rural at all, was max 12m/768k. In my current place I do have one other option which is another cable provider. They offer the exact same as Comcast for slightly less money, but the primary reason I use them is because they don’t have a monthly data cap. With my wife and I working from home plus our personal streaming, we would exceed the cap and have to pay a significant amount to increase it.
Yeah ISPs are doing rural America really dirty. I didn’t even know monthly data caps existed with home internet until somebody from a rural town mentioned it. The only internet with monthly data caps around here is cell service and even then that’s usually unlimited now.
I do a lot of download and upload and one month I realized I accidentally moved like 30 TB that month.
Yar harr? Or wfh programmer?
I have a home server which is used for quite a bit. Bunch of web apps including storage so downloading stuff to my phone over the internet means upload from my server, also multimedia too (That I actually pay for) via Plex, music, and podcasts. Photo hosting, sharing, and backups.
Ah yaeh that would do it.
Yeah I mean right now I’m in a relatively major city in the US (like 750K population), and the previous place I was just inside a major suburb (like 150K population). Rural is just plain screwed.
Is that the Verion 5G modem?
Fios, it’s fiber.
I have Verizon 5g with the ultra wideband service. Tower is on a light post on the street corner, speeds max out around 700/70 for me. 400/400 sounds like Fios which is a fiber service.
How is this possible? Most of network hardware is symmetric. It doesn’t make sense.
Cable Internet / DOCSIS splits bandwidth in a way that greatly prioritizes download over upload.
I mean network hardware between providers.
It’s a last-mile thing. Artificially boosts the download numbers which most customers look at.
Doesn’t DOCSIS 4.0 support 10gbps down and 6gbps up?
The biggest benefit of DOCSIS 4.0 is the ability to dynamically reallocate bandwidth between upload and download.
In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it’s an anti-“piracy” measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.
I could give a shit what they call it. How about enforcing some god damn price restrictions or make data caps illegal? Speed means little otherwise
This actually does keep prices in check. Albeit, a bit backasswardsly.
I may be off on the specifics but it’s something like: Having to offer 100mbps at the lowest rates in (poor neighborhoods) increases the speeds of each tier while keeping the price the same.
Thats great but can we demand some decent UPLOAD to?
cries in 300down measally 10 up
Upload is the biggest nobody gives a fuck in this ISP provider shit despite its importance.
In the linked pdf, it does mention the benchmarks.
- 2015/current standard is 25/3 Mbps.
- Proposed increase to 100/20 Mbps.
- Future goal is 1000/500 Mbps.
And really, 20 mbps at the bottom tier for broadband isn’t all that unreasonable. We’re talking about the floor level here.
20mbits at bottom tier would be fine, but there are currently top tier cable plans, 1gbps down and still only 10mbps up. Upload speed needs to scale at least proportionallly, if not symmetrically.
I felt so gaslit by optimum because they advertise 1gbps parallel. But, if you don’t have their fiber offering in your region they’ll happily sell you 1gbps/24mbps for the same price.
Although, unless I complain, they fail to give me even 300mbps down.
I miss Google Fiber :(
Found the Charter/Spectrum customer!
Sitting here with my cool 11 up from spectrum 😎
GIGA-SPEEDS!! … Such bullshit
Isn’t that partly a consequence of the cable internet network design? The existing DOCSIS standards are designed to favour download speeds, so the infrastructure doesn’t allow asymmetric connections.
If I understand correctly it’s not intrinsic to the DOCSIS standards, it’s just how more or less every cable company chooses to allocate channels. Think like a cable company has 100 channels they may be able to use on a given line, and they choose to put 90 of them on download and 10 on upload (numbers are made up to convey idea). Now they have only a small amount of available upload bandwidth and lots of download, but they could have set it up to be 50/50 to have it be equal.
Ah okay. So the infrastructure is designed that way, but not because it’s cable/DOCSIS.
Can’t wait til they give another few hundred billion to ISPs who turn it into bonuses instead of infra improvement
As it should have been 5 years ago. Maybe even more.
5 years late but better than never.
I did telecom work about 5 years ago
It was shocking the amount of area that depends on a low-quality copper wire infrastructure.
I don’t know if that changed in 5 years, but companies are going to have a hard time getting that replaced nationwide
They just won’t be able to call it broadband.
We live in a rural area (but only 16 miles from the nearest city) and have copper. We really hope the infrastructure bill will bring real internet to us in our lifetime.
If congress passes a bill to improve internet infrastructure, it will be a 10s of billions hand out to ISPs that in turn will do little to nothing to actually improve their infrastructure. Just like when they did it in the 90s to get fiber to most Americans.
They already got billions from the government to upgrade their infrastructure. It’s on them if they didn’t actually use the money for that by now.
I would think that per FCC this requirement has loop holes and the minimum 100 Mbps is most likely for only broadband not dial up, so many telecommunication companies will be except
Cries in Australian
Laugh in Western European (10Gbps)
Cries in Brexit
cries.
Cries in German. (I personally have Speedy Internet but many people I know have internet that really sucks slowly.)
My relative lives in Germany and can confirm that they have potato internet there
My first thought is you need to buy new network equipment to utilize 10 gbit and new ethernet cables.
Yeah I’d love to have anything near 100Mbps. Currently get 12Mbps on a good day, usually around 6Mbps. This is after spending thousands of dollars to upgrade the connection last year. Australian internet is fucked.
That’s crazy. Here in São Paulo (Brazil), wired internet plans start at 100 Mbps and you’ll often end up with 300+ Mbps, because there’s almost no difference in price.
Faster: Australian for tears
I just don’t get it. Why not making upload speed same as download speed?
the most simple explanation is that total bandwidth is limited and more upload speed they give you the less download speed.
What about full duplex links?
You can still spend more of the links on download if you wanted to
On all lines the total amount of available bandwidth has to be split between upload and download. If you’ve got gigabits or even hundreds of megabits to play with then symmetric is great, but on slower connections is makes a world of sense to heavily favour download just because humans are better at consuming information than creating it. Consider how many hours of videos the average person watches per week versus how many they create in the same period. Same for photos, emails, articles, etc. There are people who have parity but they are in a pretty tiny minority.
That said, I hear there are people in the US getting 300Mb/s down and 10Mb/s up which is pretty fucking nuts.
Australia here. 250 down, 20 up
Because regular users need more download than upload, while servers need more upload than download.
100 mbps? That’s 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I’d certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that’s slower than smoke signals.
I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names
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Sarcasm noted, but: mibi/gibi are the powers of 2 version.
We all say megabit or gigabit when talking about internet speeds, but in many cases under the hood it’s actually measured in mibi/gibibits. Just means it’s 2% more when converted into base 10 ;)
Good point on the first part. On the second… There’s very little networking stuff that isn’t pretty much handled in powers of 10 everywhere. I mean, eventually every number gets handled as binary at some point, but otherwise it’s pretty rare for network values to get converted to some power-of-2 number.
Way more common is the stupid bits/bytes confusion.
How about Mebinibbles?
Gibiwords
I say we split the different and go for nibbles per fortnight.
The reason we don’t is because the network does not care how the files you transfer are formatted.
It measure the amount of bits it can transfer.
Whether the file in question is for example a text document (8bit) or a HEIF (10bit)
Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.
👆 Pedant.
👆 Humorless git.
Debate pervert 👆
You’re right, I’m horny for words.
I tried to get it to point to my username (but it’s cool if you want to argue)
No, you didnt
I almost replied saying you had no idea you were talking about, but then I realized… Lol
Except that’s like dividing by zero. A millibit is undefined. A bit is the smallest indivisible unit of digital information.
But capitalization is important to distinguish between b for bit and B for Byte.
No, that’s like dividing by 1,000.
Anyway, computer scientists split the bit back in 1969, which is how we’re able to make smaller and smaller computers: the bits are all smaller, so we can pack more into a single potato chip.
Lol thanks for the chuckle
Information entropy is measured in bits, and the bits are almost always fractional.
Good catch but not quite. bps is a rate so it is allowed to be an abstract expression.
How many chickens per hour cross the road?
And more importantly, why.
If you had really slow Internet, like smoke signals or semaphores across a nation, you could characterize it as millibit:
1 bit over 1000 seconds = 1 millibit/s.
But yeah, it’s basically meaningless in today’s age for Internet speeds.
The title used the wrong abbreviation and you didn’t read the linked press release. The previous standard was 25/3 Mbps so there’s no reason to downgrade; had you bothered to read the link you’re supposedly commenting on you’d see the new standard is 100/20 Mbps. That’s also laughably low for a regular household with a modicum of modern usage but we can’t really expect much from agencies under regulatory capture.
They were making a joke about units and the use of a lowercase m instead of an uppercase M for Megabits per second…
You might have figured it out by now, but “megabits per second” is abbreviated as “Mbps” with an uppercase m; yeah, it’s kinda pedantic, but using lowercase means it’s a millibit, which is much, much smaller. The same applies to “gigabits per second,” which should be expressed as “Gbps.”
At any rate, thank you for posting this, it really is good news. And about time they did this, too.
I think it’s common parlance to use Mbps and mbps interchangeably since nothing uses “millibits” as a unit of measurement. More commonly people misuse Mbps and MBps which is incorrect since it signifies bits and bytes.
To avoid the Mb/MB confusion I’ve gotten in the habit of writing Mbit and MByte, so there’s really no ambiguity (like, even if I used them right, it’s reasonable that people might not be sure if I’m using them right or not)
At least when talking about network-related things, particularly transfer rates. With storage and things it’s way more rare that anyone might be talking about bits.
No one would ever say millibits, because a bit is the smallest meaningful datapoint. It’s a non-existent term, and a very pointless pedantic hill to try to build so that you can die on it
Literally no one means “millibit” when they type mbps…
There is no 1000ths of a 0 or 1.
Milibit does not exist.
Network speed is measured in Megabits per second, which is indeed 8 times smaller than Megabyte per second that OSes show when transferring files.
