The basics of the binary code  

•      It all starts with 1’s and 0’s (binary code)

•      A bit is either a “1” or a “0”

•      A byte is a sequence of bits, usually 8 bits.

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•      A “bit” is denoted by a lower case “b” while a “byte” is denoted by an upper case “B”.

•      The speed of a communication link is typically measured in bits per second (bps).

•      The size of a data file is typically measured in bytes.

•      Confusion – If a 3 MB file is sent over a 3 Mbps communication line, it doesn’t take one second, it actually would take around 8 seconds.  

Kilobyte         – 1,000 Bytes

Megabyte     – 1,000,000 Bytes

Gigabyte       – 1,000,000,000 Bytes

Terabyte       – 1,000,000,000,000 Bytes

Interesting Facts

•      A standard MP3 music file is @ 3 to 4 MB

•      A 2 hour movie is @ 1.5 GB (1,500 MB)

•      A 10 minute HD YouTube video can be over 1GB (1,000 MB)

•      A HD ITV class streams at 1,472Kbps (1.5Mbps)

Scary Fact

•      If you have a 15Mbps internet connection, and you can attain 100% throughput, downloading or streaming a 10 minute HD YouTube video would take approximately 9 minutes! And that is not allowing any additional internet traffic.  

The calculation

The maximum bandwidth for your school district is 15Mbps – 15,000,000 bits/second. To convert it to Bytes per second you have to divide it by 8.

                        15,000,000 bits/second = 1,875,000 Bytes per second maximum download speed

                                                  8

If someone is going to download a 1GB file (1,000,000,000 bytes) you have to divide the file size by the maximum download speed of you bandwidth, in Bytes.

                                         1,000,000,000 Bytes    =  533 seconds

                                     1,875,000 Bytes/second

533 seconds mathematically translates into 8.88 minutes.