Megabit (Mb) vs. Megabyte (MB): What’s the Difference?

Do you know the difference between a megabit (Mb) versus a megabyte (MB)?

Megabits (Mb) and megabytes (MB) may sound identical, but they don’t mean the same thing.

Today, we’re going to explain everything you need to know about the megabit (Mb) and the megabyte (MB).

What Is a Megabit?

First, we need to go back to the piece that starts it all—the bit. A bit is a binary digit, the smallest unit of digital, computerized data. A megabit contains about 1 million of those bits. So, Megabit (Megabits per second, or Mbps) is a term we use most often when talking about the speed of our internet connection. It is a measurement of data transfer speed. 1 Mbps is one million bits per second.

For example, your favourite film in HD maybe 12 GB in size and to download it using a 10 Mbps internet plan would take nearly three hours. However, with a 500 Mbps internet plan, you’d have your film in about three minutes.

What Is a Megabyte?

A byte is a unit of measurement that relates to memory in computer and broadband systems. One byte is made up of 8 bits. Data is normally measured in bytes rather than bits, and larger groupings of bytes will be called different things based on how many bytes there are. When considering broadband packages, you’ll need to keep bytes in mind when measuring how much data you can download. Every download you perform is made up of a certain amount of bytes.

You may be more familiar with gigabytes (GB) or even terabytes (TB), as they are more commonly used these days in terms of data storage. A gigabyte holds about 1000 megabytes of data, and a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. For example, a computer’s RAM is 8 GB.

Comparing Megabits and Megabytes

Here are the basic comparison between Megabits and Megabytes:

• A megabit is used to measure download and upload speeds.
• A megabyte is used to measure file size. The measurement is the same, whether you refer to storage devices or file transfers.
• Megabits are advertised as Mbps.
• Megabytes are advertised as MBps.

Why Is it Important To Understand The Differences?

The speeds of your internet connection are measured in Mbps (Megabits per second). The same way as 8 Megabits make up one Megabyte, 8 Mbps are equal to one MB/s (Megabyte per second). If your connection speed is 100 Mbps, you can download 12.5 MB of data per second. If a file you download is 100 MB in size, it will take less around 8 seconds to download it at this speed.

Here’s approximately how long it would take to download the following media types at various connection speeds:

Media	File size	1 Mbps	3 Mbps	5 Mbps	10 Mbps	30Mbps	50 Mbps
Webpage	1 MB	8s	2s	1s	<1s	<1s	<1s
MP3 song	3 MB	25s	8s	5s	2s	<1s	<1s
10-minute SD video clip	500 MB	1h 10 mins	23 mins 18s	14 mins	7 mins	2 mins 19s	1 min 23s
SD film	2 GB	4h 46 mins	1h 35 mins	57 mins 15s	28 mins 37s	9 mins 32s	5 mins, 43s
HD film	12 GB	28h 38 mins	9h 32 mins	5h 43 mins	2h 52 mins	57 mins 15s	34 mins, 21s

Conclusion

Mbps	MBps
Mbps refers to megabits per second	MBps refers to megabytes per second
Measures data speed. If you are looking for in Internet provider, all the speeds will use bits	Measures data volume or storage capacity
A byte is a collection of eight bits	A byte is the smallest storage slot in terms of memory. Bytes are generally measures in hard drives, SSDs, USB sticks, and system memory.
The value is either “1” or “0” but can also signify “on” and “off”	1 byte= 8 bits
Megabits per second (Mbps) indicates how fast a network or Internet connection is.	Megabytes per second (MBps) indicates the rate a file is downloaded or uploaded

Hopefully, now you have a much better idea of the difference between megabits and megabytes. If you have any other questions, you can contact us. We will reply to you as soon as we can. Looking forward to your messages.

 References:

Mbps vs. MBps | Difference Between Megabits and Megabytes (allconnect.com)

What is the Difference Between Megabits and Megabytes (backblaze.com)