Why does my company offer 500Mbits but I don't have 500MB/s download?

The Mb of your internet company are not the Megabytes that you know so well

I'm sure it has caught your attention that your internet provider offers speeds of up to 1Gb/s, 500Mb/s, 100Mb/s… but when you use your computer or console the numbers during a download or upload of a file do not come close, well, this has its explanation.

The first thing you have to understand is that no, your internet provider or ISP is not scamming you.

What is happening then? 

We already know very well that, for example, to measure distances, different scales or denominations are used depending on where you live, in USES either UK they use the (Mph) To measure distances or speed, in Spain the (Km/h), this also happens in computing. 

Depending on what is being talked about, some measures or others are used.

When your company shows you such huge numbers it is because they are talking about Megabits when we, the end users, are used to the Megabytes, (Emphasis must be placed on the termination, which in this case is a bit compared to the more well-known byte). 

Another way to differentiate them is to know that the “B” capital letter indicates Byte and the lowercase “b” Bit when displayed in the abbreviated form (MB, GB…)

What does it mean then?

A byte equals eight bits, Or what is the same, 8Mb is equivalent to 1MB.

EXPLANATION

A byte equals eight bits, Or what is the same, 8Mb is equivalent to 1MB.
Let's see a couple of examples

500Mb/s (Note the b lowercase letter indicating Bit), translated into what we most easily understand would be 62.5MB/s (Note the b capital letter indicating Byte), 
This calculation consists of go from MB to MB, this is done by dividing by 8. That is, 500/8 = 62.5MB/s
– It would be 62.5MB/s, Now, the real speed that we are going to see when we download files, games, etc... 

In conclusion, the internet providers (ISP) They use the bit scale and in this way they can show much larger numbers that attract more customer attention.