A megabit is a unit of measurement for data size, most often used in discussions of data transfer. Megabits are expressed as Mb or Mbit when referring to digital storage, or Mbps (megabits per second) in the context of data transfer speeds. All of these abbreviations are denoted with a lowercase 'b'.
What is a MB, GB and TB? The difference between megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes!
It takes eight megabits to make a megabyte (abbreviated as MB). Megabits and megabytes sound the same, and their abbreviations use the same letters, but they do not mean the same thing. It is important to distinguish between the two when calculating things like the speed of your Internet connection and the size of a file or hard drive.
For example, an internet speed test might measure your network speed at 18.20 Mbps, which means that 18.20 megabits are transferred every second. The same test might say that the available bandwidth is 2.275 MBps, or megabytes per second, and the values are equal. As another example, if a file you download is 750 MB, it is also 6,000 Mb.
A bit is a binary digit or a small unit of computer data. It is smaller than the size of a single character in an email, but for simplicity, consider it the same size as a text character. So a megabit is about the size of a million characters.
