I’ve recently been seeing posts talking about how fast the 4G network is going to be and how ‘absurd’ the prices for data packages are depending on the ‘fact that the allowance could be depleted within several seconds.
There are mainly 2 misunderstandings in here:
- 1. Mb/s is not MB/s
Some people are not aware of the differences between Mbps and MBps. They are quite similar, however, the relationship between them is actually:
8 Mbps (Mega bits per second) = 1 MBps (Mega bytes per second)
Generally the bandwidth we see in every advertisement are using the Mbps as it obviously tends be a bigger number.
- 2. Being able to reach a higher speed doesn’t mean using your allowance at that rate
Some people are saying things like ‘I pay 40 RMB for 300 MB data allowance, which can be used up in a few seconds under the 4G speed’. Despite the fact that he made the aforementioned mistake, he is also assuming that during his time of using the network connection, data will be constantly downloaded to his phone at the highest speed causing his remaining allowance to shrink at the same speed. This can be true if he is trying to stream an online video, which is an unwise action considering the allowance is relatively not big. Most webpages are only within several hundred kilo bytes in size and applications that utilize Internet access tend to consume maximum allowances of a few mega bytes per day, which is acceptable.
In a nut shell, what the increase in speed does is simply reducing the time for data to be fetched to your phone.
