Husky71

Thanks nanobot, I agree with a lot of what you wrote. In this case however, I'm pretty sure the speed being report was meant to be in bits per second not bytes per second. Assuming that's correct, then the KiB unit wouldn't apply as that's a binary multiple of 8 bit octets. ISO/IEC 80000-1 (Part 1 of ISO/IEC 80000) is the general section that covers quantities and units. ISO/IEC 80000-13 (Part 13 of 80000) is the part that covers information science. It has some other great references. I've found the NIST page to be a very good starting out point for folks wanting to get acquainted with units. BIPM is the international body that regulates/maintains the SI and NIST is the US agency that participates in the international quantities and units standards work for us. So if one wants to go to the source, the BIPM page can be found here: http://www.bipm.org/en/measurement-units/

As someone who works in the industry developing recommendations and standards, I'm happy to provide references to the various internationally recognized references where the various terms are defined or codified. There are all sorts of references out there that people point to from time to time that are not authoritative sources on the topic, meaning that they are not traceable to a standards body such as BIPM, IEC/ISO, ITU, etc. I've seen mistakes in those documents, which unfortunately only continue to further propagate misuse and confusion.

My upload speed test result was reported with units of Kbps. I know the intent was to state the speed in kilo bits per second, but per SI unit rules a capital K is the unit for temperature, kelvin. The ten to the third power multiplier prefix kilo is abbreviated using a lower case k. See http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/ And to be strictly correct, the internationally standardized abbreviation for binary digit is bit. International standards bodies do not recognize b as a further abbreviation for bit. Interesting factoid, John Tukey, who worked at Bell Labs, first suggested the word bit as an abbreviation for binary digit. Claude Shannon first used the word in publication in his paper A Mathematical Theory of Communications. And to go one step further, SI unit usage and grammar rules frown on the use of p to represent per in a unit formulation. So strictly the unit would properly be kbit/s or kbit * s^-1