By default, Speedtest.net measures your connection speed in Mbps, meaning Megabits Per Second. Mbps is the ISP industry-standard, and we use it on Speedtest.net so you can easily compare your result to your broadband plan's speed.

However, we offer four different options on your settings page:

• kbps or Kilobits Per Second - One kilobit is 1000 bits, and bits are the smallest possible unit of information (a little on/off switch). This was typically used by mobile connections, but as mobile carriers get faster they're switching over to megabits.
• kB/s or KiloBytes Per Second - Bytes are made up of eight bits, so one kilobyte equals eight kilobits. File-sizes on your computer are typically measured in bytes, so you'll usually see kilobytes used by download utilities. Bytes are capitalized when used in acronyms to distinguish them from bits, since both start with the letter B.
• Mbps or Megabits Per Second - The default, as we've already discussed. It takes 1000 kilobits to make a megabit.
• MB/s or MegaBytes Per Second - It takes eight megabits to make one megabyte. Most of the files on your computer are measured in megabytes, and if you have a fast connection you'll see this used in download utilities.

If you're comparing our speed test to another measurement, please make sure they're using the same unit. Otherwise, you are not getting a level comparison and may be seeing much lower or higher results than you expected.