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Why round down the Byte ratio?

Ado16
Grafter
Posts: 119
Thanks: 5
Registered: ‎15-05-2012

Why round down the Byte ratio?

Probably been asked many a time - but when there's 1024bytes in a KB and so on and so forth - Why does Plusnet round the figures down?  Those missing bytes would save me from going over at the end of the month probably!  Wink
1 REPLY 1
spraxyt
Resting Legend
Posts: 10,063
Thanks: 674
Fixes: 75
Registered: ‎06-04-2007

Re: Why round down the Byte ratio?

It isn't rounded down. The official meaning is the kilo, mega and giga are decimal 1000-based prefixes and kibi (kilobinary), mebi (megabinary) and gibi (gigabinary) are binary 1024-based prefixes.
So 1kB (or 1KB) = 1000 bytes, 1MB = 1000kB and 1GB = 1000MB
and 1KiB = 1024 bytes, 1MiB = 1024KiB and 1GiB = 1024MiB.
With small sizes, the difference between decimal and binary units is small, but much increased sizes make it important to use the correct symbols. Anyone going over their decimal-based GB usage limit would have to pay 1.073741824 times more (7.4%) for a binary-based GiB limit. Smiley
David