The terms bits and bytes in computer networking refer to standard units of digital data that are sent over network connections. There are 8 bits for every 1 byte.
Computer Skills Course: Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes (UPDATED VERSION)
The prefix "mega" in megabit (Mb) and megabyte (MB) is often the preferred way to express data transfer speeds, since we are mostly talking about bits and bytes in the thousands. For example, your home network might download data at 1 million bytes per second, which might be better written as 8 megabits per second, or even 8 Mb/s.
Some measurements yield bits with huge values, such as 1,073,741,824. This is the number of bits in one gigabyte (1.024 megabytes).
Computers use bits (short for binary digits) to represent information in digital form. A computer bit is a binary value. When represented as a number, bits have a value of 1 or 0.
