Another example of manipulation in pricing is the unit of measure of DSL speed.
All ISP providers across all countries advertise their speed in Mbps which is Mega bit per second.
Now remember that 1 Byte = 8 bits.
No-one ever uses bits as unit of measure in anything yet ISP use it just to make their speed look 8x bigger than they are.
Frankly this is a form of false advertisement that spreaded quick forcing everyone to adopt it.
I used to agree with you back in the 90s, when the only people who paid for an internet connection were somewhat technically aware enough to know what speed they wanted, but not enough to know the difference between bits and bytes.
Today? I would argue 95% of people don't know or care how many kilobyte per second their Spotify uses, or how many gigabytes per minute watching Twitch at 1080p uses.
bit per second is a pretty standard way to measure network traffic. Just be glad they aren't listing baud!
The networking community historically follows a tradition coming from telecoms, which is why there is a bit of a cultural split between networking folks and other computing folks (software and hardware folks have more cultural connection to each other than to networking!)
Apenwarr actually traces this cultural and historical split forward [1] even to the difference between lower levels of the stack defined by IEEE standards (e.g. 802.11) and higher levels of the stack defined by IETF (e.g. IP).
The telecommunications companies themselves screw up the numbers all the time. When you talk to their customer service, tech support, sales, etc, they will say 'megabyte' or 'gigabyte'.
Thank you for this insight! That WOULD make sense!
Unfortunately given the shadiness of pricing in telecoms I believe the pricing and unit of measure are not technical-based and the bits part is not because they are actually super technical about it.
Bits per second is really the only honest way to sell linespeed.
Right from the start telegraphy used symbols per second because anything else gets difficult to explain (eg hello is 5 symbols, Hello is 7 symbols). 200 years later we've made this more complex, not less. If I send a byte, it ends up as approx 64 bytes on the wire. Which bytes do we count? Do we count inter-frame spacing?
Symbols per second for transit and packets per second for routing are the only metrics that are actually fair
