When we pay for our internet connection, we pay for a specific speed of connection, however many people have a misconception about what your connection speed is.

Okay usually when we look at our connection speeds we see (for example) 8Mb, with the unit it is calculated in being Mb, now people seem to assume that Mb stands for MegaByte, wheras really Mb stands for MegaBit, which is 1/8th of a MegaByte (MB = Megabyte, Mb = MegaBit), so in reality when you pay for 8Mb (MegaBit) connection speed you’re really getting a 1MB (MegaByte) connection speed.

Additionally, when people talk about Internet (Data) Speeds, they refer to/look upon it as a literal speed, or the time taken to get from Point A to Point B, really this is not true, when you look at data speed in a unit of data you are really looking at the amount of data that can be sent simultaneously, (usually) per second, the time that data takes to get from Point A to Point B is called Latency (or Ping time), and yes it is true, that Fiber Optic connections are faster, not because it can send more data per second, but because it lowers latency, which generally can improve your internet speed, however bare in mind, that when using the internet, you’re both sending and receiving data, so if the sender has poor latency, or a limited connection speed (Mb/s) you too will feel the decrease in performance.