Bytes

       What is the difference between bits and bytes?

   Bits and Bytes both measure amounts of data. However, they are typically used in two different contexts.

Bits, kilobits (Kbps), and megabits (Mbps) are most often used to measure data transfer speeds. This may refer to how fast you are downloading a file, or how fast your Internet connection is. For example, if you are downloading a file on cable modem, your download speed might be 240Kbps. This is much faster than a dial-up modem, which maxes out at 56Kbps.

Bytes, on the other hand, are used to measure data storage. For example, a CD holds 700MB (megabytes) of data and a hard drive may hold 250GB (gigabytes). The other important difference is that bytes contain eight bits of data. Therefore, a 240Kbps download is only transferring 30KB of data per second. However, kilobytes per second is not as commonly used as kilobits per second for measuring data transfer speeds. After all, using kilobits per second (Kbps) makes your connection sound eight times faster!

It is important to know that bytes are abbreviated with a capital B, where as bits use a lowercase b. Therefore, Mbps is megabits per second, and MBps is megabytes per second. So 8Mbps is equal to 1MBps.

The terms bits and bytes in computer networking.refer to standard units of digital data transmitted over network connections.

How Bits and Bytes are Created

Computers use "bits" (short for "binary digits") to represent information in digital form. A computer bit is a binary value. When represented as a number, bits can have a value of either '1 (one)' or '0' (zero).

Modern computers generate bits from higher and lower electric voltages running through the device's circuits.

Computer network adapters convert these voltages into the form needed to physically transmit bits across the network link, a process sometimes called encoding. Methods of network message encoding varies depending on the transmission medium: For example:

• Ethernet connections carry bits using electric signals of varying voltages
• Wi-Fi connections carry bits using radio signals of varying frequencies
• fiber connections carry bits using pulses of light

A byte is a simply a fixed-length sequence of bits. Modern computers organize data into bytes to increase the data processing efficiency of network equipment, disks and memory.