Why is network speed measured in bits per second rather than bytes per second?

Marketing strategies - the number sounds more impressive in bits per second (it is eight times bigger). Also there are historical reasons involved in that historically, signaling speeds were measured in “baud” and the number of baud occurs extensively in calculations involving such things as signaling bandwidth, signal to noise ratio, error rates etc., and 1 baud happens to be equal to 1 bit per second, hence it is convenient to measure signaling speeds in bits per second. . On the other hand when measuring memory capacity or designing / specifying memory systems, memory is expanded by doubling things up and a group of 8 memory locations was historically very convenient since 4 locations ( 4 bits or a “nybble”) was not enough to uniquely store all the alphanumeric characters required for a functional character set, but 8 storage locations (8 bits or a “byte”) was enough to uniquely represent the full range of characters in for example the 127 character “ASCII” character set, together with a simple “parity” error checking bit. . Thus bytes have proved convenient in specifying memory capacity and file size, whereas bits per second have proved more relevant to engineers working on data signaling problems. .

– Best wishes - Majikthise. .