this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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[โ€“] Knusper@feddit.de -1 points 2 years 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 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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.