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A bit is the smallest unit of measurement used to store information in computers, represented by a 1 or 0. Eight bits make up a byte, which can store letters, numbers, and symbols. Kilobits and kilobytes are used to measure data transfer rates, with lowercase abbreviations referring to bits and uppercase letters referring to bytes.
A bit, short for binary digit, is the smallest unit of measurement used to store information in computers. A bit is represented by a 1 or 0 with a true or false value, sometimes expressed as on or off. Eight bits make up a single byte of information, also known as an octet. The difference between a bit and a byte is the size or amount of information stored.
For example, 8 bits (1 byte) are required to store a single character. The uppercase letter “A” is expressed digitally as 01000001. A lowercase “a” is represented in binary code as 01100001. Note that the third bit is different in each octet. By rearranging the bits within the octet, a byte is capable of producing 256 unique combinations to form letters, numbers, special characters and symbols.
It can be confusing to keep storage units straight, but it can help people remember that the word smallest is the smallest storage unit. This also helps people remember the difference between larger units, such as the kilobit and kilobyte.
A kilobit is 1,000 bits, although in the binary system it is designated as 1024 bits due to the amount of space required to store a kilobit using common operating systems and storage schemes. For simplicity, however, most people think of the kilo as referring to 1,000 to more easily remember what a kilobit is. One kilobyte would then be 1,000 bytes.
Knowing the difference between a bit and a byte helps explain megabits, megabytes, gigabits, and gigabytes. For example, 1,000 kilobits is 1 megabit and 1,000 kilobytes is 1 megabyte. Since one bit is eight times smaller than one byte, 1 megabit is eight times smaller than 1 megabyte. Following this scheme, 1,000 megabits equals 1 gigabit and 1,000 megabytes equals 1 gigabyte.
Internet connection speeds are expressed in terms of data transfer rates in both directions (upload and download), as bits or bytes per second. Abbreviations, unfortunately, aren’t standardized, which makes it easy for customers or potential customers to mix up a bit and a byte when trying to determine the speed of something. For example, a speed of “750 kbps” might be misinterpreted by a customer as 750 kilobytes per second or 8 times faster than the provider intends.
A generally reliable rule of thumb is that lowercase abbreviations typically refer to bits, while an uppercase letter typically refers to bytes. Therefore, kilobits per second would be “kbps” and kilobytes would be “KBps” or “kBps”. The same goes for megabits per second (mbps) and megabytes per second (MBps). Bits can also be expressed as “Kbit”, “Mbit” or “Gbit”.
