Kilobytes and Kilobits Abbreviation Conventions

[swantesty]

When recently using testmy for checking my speed, I received a 9.5 Mbps download. I thought: "This is ridiculously low!" and made tests at a bunch of other sites that were as follows: 83.7 : 105.17 :  81 : 84.25 : 85 : and 84.5 for an average of 87Mbps (megabits).  I then realized that testmy.net must be giving their results in MBps, which is the abbreviation convention for megabytesper sec. Dividing my average score at the other sites by 8 (8 bits per byte) is (rounded off)=11MBps. (somewhat higher than the testmy result)

 

I am curious why testmy does not use the usual abbreviation for Megabytes, which would prevent  confusion with those having low speed connections. Someone with a 10 Mbps connection would receive, a score of 1.250 Mbps from testmy, and would think that they were really getting ripped off by their provider. All internet providers seem to use the Mbps abbreviation for Megabits/sec.

 

This site explains these conventions fully: https://www.maketecheasier.com/megabits-vs-megabytes-whats-the-difference/

 

Thanks for all of the great text tools!: ')

[CA3LE]

Hi swantesty,

 

 

I'm using the correct conversions, please see https://testmy.net/understand-bandwidth.

 

In your details you can see next to the result in Mbps is also the result in MB/s.

 

 

You may not be getting the same results as other tests because TestMy.net is not the other speed tests.  Other speed tests draw resources in multiple streams.  Although TestMy.net can test that way (enable the multithread speed test and test again as you normally do, keep in mind it remembers the setting next time) it does not work this way by default.  As a community we found right away that the multithread testing method that everyone uses often masks issues.  You can achieve higher results in multithread even if you have an issue affecting your bandwidth.  You should instead be tuning single thread performance, if that performs at it's full potential the multithread results will always fall in line.

 

Multithread speed test results favor the ISP.  They'd rather you had 10 pipes at 10 Mbps than to draw that all down one pipe.  In that example you will appear to have 100 Mbps when you aggregate the result into one but in TMN's eyes... you have 10 Mbps.  TMN isn't here to make it easy, it's here to help you improve.  It will only call it how it sees it.

 

I've seen it on my own connection and my own mother has seen it on hers.  Both times (separate instances) we knew we had an issue at the time so we went out and used a bunch of other speed tests to compare what members had been telling us for years.  speedtest.net and others reported 10X higher result when we had modem issues that were physically limiting the single thread performance.  If we had only used the other tests we could have thought, "well it must just be the websites I'm visiting."   --- The only test that gave indication to the issue was TestMy.net.  Modems were swapped and both times and instantly performance returned on TMN results.  Re-testing other speed tests had pretty much the same results as before so again, no indication.  We had many other factors that were tested outside of speed tests to prove the performance was in line with what TMN was reporting.  That was probably over 7 years ago, the same is true now.  The methodology here is the same as it has been since TMN's inception in 2001.