Hacker News Reader

This may be a historical explanation, but it also seems a tacit agreement with the point above, when it says “no one wanted to be the one to switch to a ‘lower’ number.” No one measures anything in kilobits or megabits today (nor has for decades)—except ISPs measuring the speeds they promise to customers.

View on HN

Sure they do - nearly all networking gear is sold by bits/sec, e.g. gigabit Ethernet, 10Gb Ethernet, and so on.

Media encoding also commonly uses bit rates, e.g. 320kbps MP3.

Your networking equipment example goes to the same point. Why do I care how many bits are transferring per second? I don’t. I want to know bytes, since everything on my computer is measured in bytes.

Regarding media encoding, there I’m less sure. I guess those values were originally in small enough absolute values, and have not continued to climb exponentially, such that measuring in bits maybe continues to make sense.

Anyway, thanks for sharing those examples.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com