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Conventions
There are a number of differing opinions and conventions about when to use bits or bytes - and the correct way to convert between them.
Add the desire of marketing suits to make their technology look better than the competition (and the fact that not all marketing suits understand the ins and outs of the technologies they are promoting) and it is no surprise that figures are not always directly comparable.
The key thing is how the performance feels to you. You can see some real world screen grabs here.
It is reasonably well accepted that "bits" are used when talking about download speeds and that "bytes" are used when talking about file sizes. Hence typical connection speeds are quoted as 32kbit/s (phone modem) or 64kbit/s (ISDN) or 512kbit/s (ADSL and satellite) and typical file sizes are 12kbyte (text only web page) or 200kbyte (image) or 1 to 2 Mbyte (virus update) or 4Mbyte (music track) or tens of Megabytes for programs and hundreds of Megabytes for Windows updates.
It is accurate to say that 8 bits = 1 byte but this is not the whole story. You cannot simply say that a 1 MByte file downloaded in 30 seconds means a speed of 400kbit/s.
There are two reasons for conversion confusion.
Most connection technologies have some form of error correction and hardware or software compression. So there is a difference between the gross bandwidth of the data pipe and the actual net speed achieved when receiving a file down the same pipe.
Bits and Bytes should really be counted in base 8 (octal) as this preserves the relationship with binary which is fundamental when you are communicating with computers. However, when communicating with humans, most people use base 10. Hence a "kilo" could mean 1,000 or 1,024 - and a "mega" could mean 1,000 x 1,000 or 1,000 x 1,024 or 1,024 x 1024 depending on which convention is being used.
One example is that "half a meg" could be represented as either 500kbs or 512kbs - and both would be equally and approximately right.
Some authorities use lower case "b" for bits and upper case "B" for Bytes although this is by no means used by everyone consistently.
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