Ubuntu
net-tools package

  1. Bug #240073
  2. Comment #9

Comment 9 for bug 240073

Revision history for this message
Neal McBurnett (nealmcb) wrote : Re: Ifconfig uses incorrect units

Bandwidth is generally measured using decimal multiples. 100 Mb/sec Ethernet is 100,000,000 bits/sec, and a 128 kbit/s MP3 stream consumes 128,000 bits per second.

IEEE, ISO, IEC, NIST and CENELEC all deprecate the use of SI units for other than powers of 10, and endorse binary prefixes like GiB. The main ongoing exception seems to be the JEDEC (for RAM, etc, which is typically built based on powers of two), though they note that ‘IEEE/ASTM SI 10-1997 states “This practice frequently leads to confusion and is deprecated.”

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Adoption for a list of 34 applications that are said to use the IEC standard binary multiple prefixes, and for lots more history and references on this.