Nowadays, the Internet has become commonplace in almost every home. But this figure is still not absolute, and quite a few people are only planning to connect the Internet to their home for the first time.
Getting acquainted with the tariffs of providers for this service, people often do not understand the meaning of various terms, such as "megabytes", "megabytes" and the like. For a person who is just planning to start his work on the Web, such designations seem unfamiliar and even similar to invented so that the provider can rip off a lot of money. But we hasten to assure you: to understand the topic of measuring Internet traffic is quite simple, which we will do now.
Mb traffic - what is it?
The designation "Mb" can be used for two different types of traffic measurements - in megabytes and megabytes. So, one megabyte contains an amount of information commensurate with 8 megabytes. The existence of two different units of information at once is determined by the technological structure of computer technology.
It’s enough for us to understand that megabytes are used to measure the number of downloaded, and megabytes to indicate the data transfer speed over the global network.
How to understand where is megabyte and where is megabyte?
Usually, special abbreviations are used, where a megabyte corresponds to a reduction in MB, and a megabyte corresponds to a reduction in Mbit, but in unregulated literature the letter combination MB can be found. What this reduction means in each case, you can check with the consultant who will draw up your application for connecting to the Internet service.
However, you are unlikely to be mistaken when you consider the Internet connection speed in megabits per second, because providers use this particular unit of measurement (Mb / s).
What is it for the convenience of using the Internet
What speed of the Internet is necessary for your needs can be determined using a small checklist:
- For the use of email and text messengers, you will have enough speeds of up to 1 Mbps.
- View information resources with large images and animations, browser and client online games - choose a tariff with a speed of 5-10 Mbit / s.
- Watch streaming video on YouTube and high-resolution audio - from 20 Mbit per second.
- Downloading the installation files of modern games or movies in the BluRay format will require speeds of 60 Mbps, if you are not ready to wait forever.
The connection speed is more than 100 megabits per second, it makes no sense to connect, if you plan to use the Internet through a cheap router, it simply will not be able to distribute Wi-Fi of such power. If you plan to connect to the Internet via a LAN cable, then only the bandwidth of your computer’s network card will become a limiter (it could also be a laptop, tablet, TV, or something else).
Traffic limitation
Some tariffs write that the volume of downloaded and transmitted traffic should not exceed, for example, 5,000 Mb. What is it, users of mobile Internet are well aware. Using a modem or 3G / 4G Internet via a SIM card is often limited to a certain level, so as not to overload the provider's network.
To understand how much traffic these or other tasks will take, we give the following examples:
- downloading a movie in average quality will take about 700 MB;
- watching an hour of videos on YouTube in HD can "eat" from 200 to 700 MB;
- viewing funny pictures on a social network is unlikely to allow you to spend more than 2-3 thousand megabytes per month.
Usually, after using the package of megabytes, the user does not lose access to the Internet, they simply limit the speed to the minimum value. Working on the Web at this speed causes terrible discomfort, so try to spend traffic sparingly if you have limited traffic.