Guide to fibre optic Speeds

This guide has been set up to assist you in determining exactly what your Fibre speed should be giving you. 

The first thing that you have to know when selecting either a 20/50/100/1000 Mb/s  Fibre line is that the term"Mb/s" actually refers to MegaBITS(Mb) per second and NOT megaBYTES(MB) per second. 

All internet speeds are measured in bits per second. A MegaByte is 8 times Larger than a Megabit, so an “up to 8 Mbps" or "8Mb” connection means the maximum you will get is 8 megabits per second, which is actually only equivalent to one MegaByte per second.

Thus, if a provider or salesperson tries to tell you that an 8Mbps internet connection is equal to 8 MegaBytes per second, they are wrong to a factor of 8. 

All Internet Service Providers (ISP) offer their packages in terms of Megabits per second(Mb/s). 
The following table illustrates the Line speeds that they offer in terms of MegaBytes per second(MB/s).

Line Speed Megabits/Second (Mb/s)	Line Speed Megabytes/Second (MB/s)
20	2,5
50	6,25
100	12,5
1000	125

The next table below looks the approximate time that it should take to download an item off the internet per line speed. The time represented in this table is purely line speed based and does not take into consideration any Network interference, Network/router losses or amount of users utilising the Network at the same instant.

So taking  out a 50Mb/s line would mean that you would be: 

• Limited to a download speed of 6.25 MegaBytes per second
• Downloading a 100MB album in as little as 16 seconds
• Downloading a 10GB BluRay movie in less than 27 minutes
• Streaming HD video straight to your computer – without buffering (This has been tested and works perfectly, it is as if you are playing the video straight off your pc)
• Hosting multiplayer games with dozens of players
• Downloading games in under two minutes

I will be reviewing an Uncapped 50Mb/S Fibre line Running at a residence in Johannesburg soon!


In our next article I highlight the major differences between ADSL and Fibre..

Adsl VsFibre..what really is the difference?

Click here to access the article 

Please feel free to leave any thoughts or comments below.