trustytrev.
Unfortunately, different people and applications use different units.
Sometimes they do it because it is a better unit for the hardware involved and the particualar protocol.
Some of the ISPs marketing folks do it just to mislead people until after they have signed a binding contract.
To make matters worse, some of the monitoring tools will actually change which representation they are using dynamically while they are running.
You really have to pay very close attention to the units used on any tool that you are using.
In the case of ISPs, you really need to pay close attention to the language used.
There have been adds locally for a service that implies ultra fast wifi by saying that it is just as fast as your wired system at home. What is not obvious until you think about it is that what they are really saying is that it is as fast as a wired system provided by them, not their competition and is therefore, actually not very fast.
So, in addition to noticing whether you are being given figures based on bytes or bits, you also have to notice whether it is bytes, kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes.
Unfortunately, the choice of what is presented is sometimes based more on what looks good than what is useful.
Also, many people have not caught on to the fact that there are more than one way to express these numbers and therefore will unintentionally misrepresent their systems specs when on forums.
If something seems too good to be true or too good for the price, be sure to do a bit more research.
I do wish that there were a global flag to set on the systems so that all such readouts from different tools on the same system would use the same units.
