My name is Ben and I am the youngest member of the Tbird team. I thought I would start my blog by cleaning up some misconceptions about networking, speeds, and the good old “Intro-net.” 

Lets start with the basics. The first thing about networking that everyone needs to know is the difference between MB’s and Mb’s. I realize that they look the same and you might even think that I am crazy because the only difference is that one has a upper case “B.”  Well that is all it takes to show the difference between a Byte and a bit. Most of us are familiar with bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and so on, as they are the standard found on our PC’s. An example would be the 720-ish megabytes (MB) found on a standard compact disc.

Why bits? When networking, data transfer, and the Internet was started the technology was no where near what it is today and they needed a smaller unit of measurement to track there networking. A bit was born. Now, what is a bit? A bit is essentially an eighth of a Byte so that means (for all you non fractional people out there) their are 8 bits in a Byte.

Confused yet? You should be.

Why do I bring this up? Because it is important to know how they play together and where you will see them.

Basically when you talk about internet speeds or networking hardware capabilities you always talk in bits. Internet service providers always advertise in bits as well as hardware manufactures like Netgear or Linksys.

Here is a shot of a speed test taken on my pc

http://www.speedtest.net/result/84419806.png

As you can see, it shows that my connection (Tbird) allows me to download and upload over 7Mb’s per second. Remember the T1 line at your office is only 1.5Mb.

Here is where it gets interesting…

I recently downloaded a file from Download.com that was 10.1 MB in size and the transfer rate from their server to my machine was 153KB per second.

I know what you are thinking, “THAT can’t be right, my connection is much faster!”

Take it easy, first of all Windows shows downloads as Bytes and not Bits so the transfer rate is 1224kb per second (153KB * 8). That tells me that their server is on a T1 connection because although Thunderbird is blazing fast, you can only download as fast as your source can upload.

Well I hope this helps someone better understand this topic. Next up… Wireless…later though, I need to make a sandwich J