Bandwidth Calculator

Calculate bandwidth, file transfer times, data conversions, and website bandwidth requirements.

Data Unit Converter

Convert between different data size units

Download/Upload Time Calculator

Calculate transfer time based on file size and bandwidth

Website Bandwidth Calculator

Estimate monthly bandwidth needs for a website

Account for bots, retransmissions, etc.

Bits vs. bytes — the most common mix-up

Internet speeds are almost always advertised in bits per second (Mbps, Gbps), while file sizes are almost always measured in bytes (MB, GB) — and there are 8 bits in a byte. This is why a "100 Mbps" connection downloads a 100 MB file in about 8 seconds at best, not 1 second — a distinction that trips up a lot of people estimating download times.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my actual download slower than my rated internet speed suggests? Real-world throughput is affected by network overhead, server-side limits, other devices sharing the connection, and WiFi signal quality — the theoretical maximum speed is rarely achieved consistently in practice.

Why does the website bandwidth tool include a "redundancy factor"? Actual bandwidth usage is typically higher than page views × average page size alone, due to bot traffic, failed/retried requests, and cached-but-still-counted resource loads — the redundancy multiplier accounts for this real-world overhead.

Are these unit conversions using 1000 or 1024 as the base? This calculator uses the decimal (1000-based) convention common in networking and storage marketing (kilobyte = 1000 bytes), rather than the binary (1024-based) convention some operating systems use internally — the difference is small but not zero at larger scales.