Welcome to Otter Tech 101! Have a seat, please.

I've seen a lot of misconceptions about gigabit internet, Google Fiber in particular. People mistakenly believe that with Google Fiber, they'll be getting download speeds of up to a gigabyte per second. Unfortunately, that's not true.

A byte is a unit of computer memory constructed of eight bits. (What's a bit, you may ask? Who cares, that's not important right now.) One byte equals eight bits, one kilobyte equals eight kilobits (or 8000 bits), one megabyte equals eight megabits (or eight million bits), so on and so forth. This is why you'll often see internet services advertised as 10Mb/s, when your actual download speed seems to top out at around one megabyte per second, give or take. This is where you need to be careful. The abbreviation for "-byte" is an uppercase "B," whereas the abbreviation for "-bit" is a lowercase "b." So if something is advertised as "50MB/s," it refers to bytes, whereas "50Mb/s" would be referring to bits.

With internet speeds, you never have a perfect connection. Even with ethernet, there's going to be some lag when connecting to various servers, and data transmission can be slowed a bit as it travels back and forth from your router to the server, etc., so you'll never really get internet that's quite as fast as your advertised speed. The general rule of thumb is to take your advertised speed in megabits per second, divide by ten, and that'll probably be close to your actual download speed in megabytes per second.

So, why do internet companies advertise their connection speeds in bits instead of bytes? It all comes down to cynical business. "100 megabits per second" sounds a lot more enticing than "10 megabytes per second."

So anyway, back to Google Fiber. When they advertise their service as "one gigabit per second", what that actually means is "100 megabytes per second." Which obviously is still blazing fast compared to what most people have today, but not quite as magically speedy as some would believe.

I hope that helped clear up some misconceptions you may have and bestowed some mega rad knowledge on you, brother!