For the love of god I swear the next person who asks me why they can’t download at 10 megabytes a second on Virgins 10Mb service is going to get a slap. There for i’m making this post so you can all read it a savour….

First of all they make the numbers look so big, 2Mb might not sound like a lot, but 10Mb, WOW!, and 20Mb but how they should really do it is, 50Mb=5MB, 10Mb=1MB, 2Mb=0.25MB

Notice the difference?

Mb=Megabits
MB=Megabytes

There is 8 bits in a byte
So 2Mb (2 million bits), is the equivalent to 0.25MB (0.25 million bytes)

Now if they were to sell you a package which contained 0.25MBps, would you go ahead with it? No because it seems so little so they just rename it to 2Mb. So dont be confused, 2Mb actually refers to you being able to download at 0.25MBps (250Kbps) But, 2Mb averages out to about 0.9Mb because of Virgin Media traffic shaping.

I hope that’s made things a bit clearer so when they launch a 100Mb service for some rediculous sum of money just remember it’s only 10MB.