this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
879 points (96.8% liked)

memes

10405 readers
1811 users here now

Community rules

1. Be civilNo trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour

2. No politicsThis is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world

3. No recent repostsCheck for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month

4. No botsNo bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins

5. No Spam/AdsNo advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.

Sister communities

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] Knusper@feddit.de -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thing is, there's no rational reason to arbitrarily use groups of 8 bits for transmission over the wire. It's not just ISPs who use bits, the whole networking industry does it that way.

[โ€“] vithigar@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

To expand on this a bit more, bits are used for data transmission rates because various types of encoding, padding, and parity means that data on the wire isn't always 8 bits per byte. Dial up modems were very frequently 9 bits per byte (8-n-1 signalling), and for something more modern PCIe uses 8b/10b encoding, which is 10 bits on the line for each 8 bits of actual payload.