About bandwidth units
You will often see bandwidth and transfer speed quoted in two different units: kilobits per second, abbreviated kbps or Kb/s, and kilobytes per second, abbreviated KB/s. The difference between the two units is the number of bits in a byte, which is 8. The small ‘b’ stands for bits, and the big ‘B’ stands for bytes. Transfer speeds are often shown in KB/s, and connect speeds are usually quoted in Kb/s.
So, for instance, if a progress dialog for a modem shows you a download speed of 4.3 KB/s, it is the same as 34.4 Kb/s. If a progress dialog for a cable modem shows you a transfer speed of 100 KB/s, it is the same as 800 Kb/s.
We display our measured transfer speeds in Kb/s, to make them easier to compare with your rated line speed.
