why does having 1000mb/s of download speeds doesn’t translate to actually downloading things at 1gb a second

Question

It’s still super fast, but a 60gb download should be in the ball park of 1min but it frequently would take 10-15min

Edit: I have symmetrical 1GB fiber connection with a router specced for WiFi 7. I did mess up the abbreviation for megabytes, my bad y’all.

Edit 2: I may have messed it up again. IM 5 YALL

Edit 3: bit vs byte 🥵🌶️

In: Technology

Answer 1

File sizes are normally expressed as giga*byte* and network speeds are expressed as giga*bit*. A bit is a singular 1 or 0, a byte is 8 of those. Therefore, if your internet speed is 1 Gb/s and you are needing to transmit a 60GB file then the fastest it can possibly go is 8 minutes and 18 seconds. 1/8th of this is about what you were expecting, so your error is in the notation.