If it wasn’t to confuse people, they could just show both bits and bytes. There’s no reason not to. I’ve seen this occasionally with ethical ISPs who care about their customers (extremely rare) - they would display it like this:
Typical evening speed: 25Mbps (approx 3 megabytes per second)
Almost everyone I know who isn’t in tech is extremely confused by this distinction. Absolutely they keep the bigger number because it directly benefits them. If they’re offering the 3 speed, but competitors are offering the 25 speed, of course customers want the bigger number! Normies don’t even know what a bit is.
Since 1975 or so, the word byte has come to mean a sequence of precisely eight binary digits
I don’t think it’s a big deal or a hill to die on or anything. Since everyone does it, at least it’s consistent. But the industry is kind of shooting themselves in the foot because they get ten thousand service desk calls per day complaining about slow internet speeds that are less than one eighth of the advertised number.
There’s no reason not to include a helpful subtitle that gives you an approximation of file download speeds ( other than consumers mistaking it as a promise the company can’t actually keep), but that’s a completely different animal than advertising the bandwidth itself in bytes. Because simply converting the bits into bytes will not result in the number that the customer ultimately sees.
All you would have in that scenario is the same confused consumer calling the service desk asking why the number of Megabytes they paid for is not the number of Megabytes they get when they download a file.
This as absolutely a hill worth dying on for me. I don’t think it would be a good thing for companies to stop advertising their products based on their precise and accurate capabilities in order to sell to a consumer based on a guesstimate around one subset of use of that product.
If it wasn’t to confuse people, they could just show both bits and bytes. There’s no reason not to. I’ve seen this occasionally with ethical ISPs who care about their customers (extremely rare) - they would display it like this:
Almost everyone I know who isn’t in tech is extremely confused by this distinction. Absolutely they keep the bigger number because it directly benefits them. If they’re offering the 3 speed, but competitors are offering the 25 speed, of course customers want the bigger number! Normies don’t even know what a bit is.
I don’t particularly think the historical value of a byte is really relevant either. It’s been 8 bits for half a century now.
I don’t think it’s a big deal or a hill to die on or anything. Since everyone does it, at least it’s consistent. But the industry is kind of shooting themselves in the foot because they get ten thousand service desk calls per day complaining about slow internet speeds that are less than one eighth of the advertised number.
There’s no reason not to include a helpful subtitle that gives you an approximation of file download speeds ( other than consumers mistaking it as a promise the company can’t actually keep), but that’s a completely different animal than advertising the bandwidth itself in bytes. Because simply converting the bits into bytes will not result in the number that the customer ultimately sees.
All you would have in that scenario is the same confused consumer calling the service desk asking why the number of Megabytes they paid for is not the number of Megabytes they get when they download a file.
This as absolutely a hill worth dying on for me. I don’t think it would be a good thing for companies to stop advertising their products based on their precise and accurate capabilities in order to sell to a consumer based on a guesstimate around one subset of use of that product.
Found the marketer.