Folks, b is bits, B is bytes. For someone who deals with IT/telecomm the careless use of bits, bytes, B, b, kB/s, kb/s, kbps, MiB/s, Gbit is a source of confusion, because all those abbreviations have a very specific and distinct meaning.
And whenever someone writes something not very obvious (eg Gbit for line speed, or kb for a size of a file or network transfer chunk), I need to figure out if they don't understand the terms they use, and I should use the more likely meaning, or they know what they're talking about and I assume they really meant what they'd written.
> Folks, tomato is a fruit, celery is a vegetable. As someone who deals with botany, the careless use of...
> And whenever someone writes something not very obvious (eg Fruit salad for apples oranges and grapes...
One day, people will learn that their specialised understanding of terms, when not synchronised with an entire world of users, need to be viewed in the lens of the audience in which it sits.
In the layperson's sphere, even to the technical professional, the counting of bits is incredibly rare. The fact that the telecoms industry has crafted this case-based confusion is (naively) foolish or (cynically) immoral.
If you're not willing to presume that articles by the layperson are likely to be referring to bytes unless otherwise clarified, unfortunately that unwillingness is where the problem lies - not with the people using the language as shared with the 99.9% of the rest of the world.
That said, you do have our sympathies for your confusion. There are lots of words that our industry have introduced to the world and immediately lost the nuance of, and it will only continue.
Please, continue to bang the drum with your colleagues. Telecoms professionals should be completely precise where that precision matters. Here it does not - and the drum is just distracting noise.
I think this case-sensitive byte/bit distinction was always a bad idea, and what you're experiencing is the consequence of a bad idea, not stupid people.
For example sometimes MESSAGES ARE WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS. Now what does your B mean?
Just write b for byte and bit for bit and there's no ambiguity.
As it is, you're introducing a competing standard where lowercase b suddenly has a new meaning, making it incompatible with everything that was already written correctly in the past. Maybe it's a better system in the end, but is it worth breaking compatibility and trying to convince millions of people in the industry of a new better standard?
And whenever someone writes something not very obvious (eg Gbit for line speed, or kb for a size of a file or network transfer chunk), I need to figure out if they don't understand the terms they use, and I should use the more likely meaning, or they know what they're talking about and I assume they really meant what they'd written.