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A megabit can be 1,000,000 bits or 1,048,576 bits depending on whether you using decimal or binary definitions. Standards have been defined to help – are you using the mibibyte and kibibyte in your documentation?

The difference between binary and decimal seems small, but it can lead to very large problems. Instances of telcos providing bandwidth in decimal can cause QoS strategies to go wrong as this makes a big difference when traffic shaping. Or when calculating file transfer times for large files, you can introduce a large margin for error.

Standards for decimal and binary prefixes

In 1999, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) published a standard, which was approved in 1998, introduced the prefixes kibi-,mebi-, gibi-, tebi-, pebi-, exbi-, to be used in specifying binary multiples of a quantity. The names come from the first two letters of the original SI prefixes followed by bi which is short for "binary". It also clarifies that, from the point of view of the IEC, the SI prefixes only have their base-10 meaning and never have a base-2 meaning.

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