why is wifi speed measured in bits

@strongsand im guessing bigger number = looks more impressive, idk

@strongsand wired network speed is measured in bits too, it's not just wifi

@noisytoot why is network speed in general measured in bits

@strongsand so ISP can put bigger number

@strongsand I'm not sure but possibly because the protocol on the physical layer transmits one bit at a time and doesn't care about the size of a byte (plus bigger numbers looking more impressive which was already mentioned) (I don't actually know the details of how data is transmitted though, but ethernet is definitely serial)

sizes of SPI NOR flash are also measured in bits for some reason, which is confusing because the sizes of the stuff that's stored on them (at least when they're used for storing boot firmware) is measured in bytes

@strongsand maybe also because historically non-8-bit bytes were more common and not all devices on a network would necessarily have the same byte size (which is why all the protocol specifications refer to bytes as octets)

@noisytoot ty! this is actually pretty cool!