Your plan says 100 but downloads crawl at 12. You are not being robbed. Two nearly identical words are quietly playing a trick on you.
Your internet plan brags about a big number like 100. A hundred what, exactly? And why, when you actually download something, does it crawl along at 12? You are not being robbed. You are being confused by two words that look almost identical.
A bit is the tiniest scrap of data. A byte is eight of them bundled together. One is written with a small b, the other with a capital B.
A bit is a single yes or no, a one or a zero, the smallest thing a computer can hold. Stack eight bits together and you get a byte. From there the familiar words pile up, so a megabyte is about a million bytes, which works out to roughly eight million bits.
For most of daily life none of this matters. Bigger numbers are better, faster is nicer, and that is plenty to get by on. It only trips you up in one very specific place.
Here is the sleight of hand. Internet providers advertise speed in megabits per second, with a small b. Your files, and the little progress meter while they download, are measured in megabytes, with a capital B. Since a byte is eight bits, you quietly divide by eight.
So a 100 megabit connection tops out around 12 megabytes a second of actual downloading. Nothing is broken. The two units just wear very similar name tags. It is one piece of the picture, sitting right next to bandwidth and the ladder of megabytes and gigabytes.
Rule of thumb. See a speed with a small b, divide by eight to guess how fast files will really land. Marketing always loves the bigger number.
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