The Business Communications Minefield

There seems to be a shroud of mystery surrounding corporate connectivity. Much of this confusion has been created by the tele-communications industry themselves by the creation of a multitude of acronyms and standards. 

This special report is designed to help you quickly understand the newer standards in leased lines, the benefits that are provided by each one and so provide you with a quick guide to working out which line would be correct for your business.

A Byte out of Bits

Before we begin lets get you up to scratch on bits and bytes. There is a common misconception that if for example you download a 10MB file over a 2Mb/s line you should get it in five seconds.

This is actually incorrect as the file is measured in mega bytes but you actual line is measure in megabits. 

There are eight bits to a byte so when you purchase a 2Mb/s line you are actually subscribing to a 250,000 bytes per second line (ie 2000000/8). 

Therefore a 10MB file would actually take forty seconds to download if we assume that 10MB is equivalent to 10,000,000 bytes.  (In fact it’s actually 10485760 bytes but let’s try to keep things simple!) The table below gives you the actual calculations.

DSL Speed

Maximum Transfer Speed in bytes/sec

Transfer Speed In Kilobytes/sec

256Kb/s

32000 bytes/sec

31 KB/s

512Kb/s

64000 bytes/sec

63 KB/s

2Mb/s

250000 bytes/sec

244 KB/s

4Mb/s

500000 bytes/sec

488 KB/s

8Mb/s

1000000 bytes/sec

977 KB/