What's up with these download speeds?

I’m a little lost here. I just ran a speed test on my connection and the numbers came back at 11.6 / 1.2 Mbps
Since I’m definitely not an IT expert, my brain is trying to process this as if it means I'm pulling down 11.6 megabytes every single second.
By that logic, I'd grab 116 MB in ten seconds, which means a 770 MB movie would be finished in about 70 seconds.
But we all know reality rarely works out that smoothly.
So, what am I actually looking at when it says 11.6 Mbps

You’ve got an 11 Mbps connection, but data on your hard drives is measured in megabytes.

1 BYTE = 8 BITS

So, with 11 megabits (Mbit), you're looking at downloading about 1.3 megabytes (MB) per second—at most, I guess.

It’s a similar headache when you look at drive capacity—manufacturers tend to use 1 GB = 1000 MB just for marketing reasons, even though it's actually 1GB = 1024 MB.

Morgan Ortiz6 said:Something isn't adding up. I just ran some speed tests on my connection and these numbers came back... 11.6 down, 1.2 up... barely hanging on by a thread...
As a layman, I’m guessing that means we're talking an 11.6 MB download speed...
So that means it pulls 116 MB in 10 seconds... which puts a 770 MB movie at about 70 seconds. Fast...
Obviously, that’s not how it works in the real world...
So what’s that supposed to mean then... 11.6 Mbps... barely enough to keep things moving...

You're spot on. A little lowercase 'b' means bits, while uppercase 'B' means bytes. So you aren't pulling down 116 megabytes in 10 seconds... it's megabits. There’s a reason the notation changes when talking about storage versus speed. Just divide that number by 8 and you get your megabytes per second. It's not exactly rocket science...