Whats the difference between Mb and Gb please?

[Jenijo]

Just got a Blackberry on contract and my 'un- unlimited' usage on internet is 1Gb? (Virgin Media Fair use policy bollocks!)

What the hell does that mean?

Some useful info here

M = Mega x 1,000,000
G = Giga x 1,000,000,000

Thankyou, both of you. That's really useful stuff Bubbles! The last line said, 'very few people exceed their 1gb limit' Yeah right, you obviously haven't met many teenagers!!

We will wait and see!

b=bits B=bytes

I assume it's GB not Gb?

You'll come across a mix of bits and bytes when you deal with networking.

Speeds are usually measured in Megabits (Mb) or Gigabits (Gb).

Capacities on the other hand are somewhat confusingly usually measured in MegaBytes (MB) and GigaBytes (GB).

So you ISP will give you your download speed in Mb and your usage limit in GB. And to me that just makes things confusing.

A Gb is 1000 times the size of a Mb.

Meanwhile a GB is 1024, not 1000, times the size of an MB.

Just thought you might be trying to compare your speed in Mb to your capacity in GB.

And that gets quite complicated...

I think that O2's download speed for 3G cards is given as 7.2Mbps.

So that 7.2 * 1000 bits per second, or 7200.

Converted from b to bits to B for Byes gives that as 900 Bytes per second.

1GB = 1024 MB
1024 MB = 1,048,576 KB
1,048,576 KB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes

And at 900 Bytes a second that will give you about 1,193,046 seconds of use, or about 330 hours.

So if you can get your mobile gadget to work at full speed, which is unlikely, then you've got over 300 hours of internet usage.

See, I said it was complicated.

I've got a feeling that ISPs mix bits and bytes on purpose so that it's very hard to work out exactly what you're getting.

and then just to add to the confusion, you will get some applications using Mebibytes and Gibibytes

Er, Badgerspaws, you've dropped some noughts there.

7.2Mbps is 7.2 million bits per second, not thousand. So you're a factor of a thousand out.

So 7.2Mbps is about 0.9MB/sec, not 0.9KB/sec, again, a factor of a thousand out.

So you would consume a 1GB limit in 1100 seconds, or 18 minutes.

I said it was complicated....