Mb vs. MB

Ever see Mb and MB and wonder if there’s a difference or just a typo? There’s definitely a difference. It’s a speed vs. capacity issue. Mb (megabits per second) is the speed at which data is transferred. MB (megabyte) measures storage size or capacity. While the little “bit” equals one character of data, the big “Byte” is eight characters (or bits) of data.

A digital photo averages 2 MB, while a 2-hour movie is approximately 1 GB (gigabyte=1,024 megabytes) in size. If you download a 4 MB song on a 10 Mb connection, it will take about 3.2 seconds.