What's a Megabit?

Mega-what?

A Megabit (or Mb) is the most common way to talk about broadband speed. The higher your Mb, the faster your broadband.

It’s a multiple of a bit, which is the most basic of computing units and is used for measuring the speed of data transfer. There are 1 million bits in 1Mb.

So, what could you do with 150Mb?

• Download a TV episode in under 2 minutes
• Download an entire film in 4-and-a-half minutes
• Upload 100 high-res photos in 16 seconds

Mb, Mbps, MB

What’s the difference? Mb is Megabit, Mbps is Megabits per second, and MB is Megabyte. Megabit has a little ‘b’ (Mb) and Megabyte has a big ‘B’ (MB) – and they’re very different.

Bit means speed, byte means storage.

It takes 8 Megabits to make 1 Megabyte, which means that to download a 1MB (Megabyte) file in 1 second, your broadband needs to be 8Mb/8Mbps (Megabit/Megabit per second).

And the more Mb you have, the faster your internet is.

Still with us? This could help…

• A film is about 5,000MB (Megabytes) of storage
• If your broadband speed is 50Mb (Megabits) or 50Mbps (Megabits per second), you could download a film in just under 13-and-a-half minutes
• If your broadband speed is 150Mb or 150Mbps, you could download a film in four-and-a-half minutes
• If your broadband speed is 1,000Mb or 1,000Mbps, you could download a film in 40 seconds

A Gigabit

There are 1,000 Megabits in 1 Gigabit (or Gb, or Gbps, or Gig). That’s 1 billion bits. Phew!

Here’s what you can do with 1Gb:

• Download a TV episode in 18 second
• Download an entire film in 40 second
• Upload 100 high-res photos in 2 seconds

And don’t worry if this all sounds a bit technical. With us, it’s easy. 4 simple speeds to pick from and the more Megabits, the faster you go. 10Mb, 25Mb, 50Mb or 100Mb – the choice is yours. You can check out our packages here.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with our Customer Service team at support@melbourneisp.com or call us on 1300 798 564.