I am trying to figure out if a local company is as fast as Hughes net. The local company, I believe goes over cellular. They are telling me they have no data caps but do cap speed and 4 megaBITS per second. I don’t understand the difference in megaBITS and megabytes.
Once we hit our data limit on Hughes we can’t stream any Netflix, etc. how slow does Hughes go to?
When it comes to service speed, it's normally expressed in bits per seconds, such as kilobits per second or megabits per second. Bits per second is a decimal measure, meaning that 1000 kilobits per second is one megabit per second. These speeds are abbreviated as bps, Kbps, Mbps, and even Gbps (gigabits per second).
Sometimes you'll see speed expressed in bytes per second, such as kilobyes per second or megabytes per second, with these being shown as KBps and MBps. Note the difference in the second letter. Small b means bits, whereas large B means bytes.
When comparing the two, bytes per second is a larger measure than bits per second, and one byte per second is equal to eight bits per second. So, 1MBps equals 8Mbps, and conversely, 1Mbps equals 0.125MBps, or 1/8th of a MBps.
It's a little confusing, but nearly all speed tests show speeds in bits per second, and nearly all ISPs advertise in bits per second, such as HughesNet with 25Mbps.
As an example, this is a testmy.net speed test result from a couple of nights ago. It's showing 36.7 megabits per second (in blue), with the megabytes per second shown in parentheses to the right (4.6MBps).
With regard to HughesNet when you hit your data cap, the speeds are normally reduced to no higher than around 3Mbps. They're "typically 1Mbps - 3Mbps", though, depending on system congestion, as in how many people are using the system at any given time, it can be lower than that. As well, system congestion can affect streaming even when your overall speeds should be adequate.
When you have reached your data cap and your speeds are throttled, you can try reducing the Netflix definition to Standard or even Low definition to see if it helps.
Hope this helps. :)
Not to be pedantic, but a Byte is actually counted as larger than 8bits. It's usually 10 or 11 depending upon additional parity/error correction bits and a possible stop bit.
Twinsmommy wrote:I am trying to figure out if a local company is as fast as Hughes net. The local company, I believe goes over cellular. They are telling me they have no data caps but do cap speed and 4 megaBITS per second.
That's a lot slower than my normal speed with Hughes of 26 to 31 mbps.
gaines_wright wrote:
Twinsmommy wrote:I am trying to figure out if a local company is as fast as Hughes net. The local company, I believe goes over cellular. They are telling me they have no data caps but do cap speed and 4 megaBITS per second.
That's a lot slower than my normal speed with Hughes of 26 to 31 mbps.
Back when I was stuck with 3Mbps with windstream I had to "start" the video, immediately pause it, and let it buffer/load a sizable chunk before unpausing the video. But that was on youtube and amazon video, so I am not sure if netflix works the same way or not.
