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About these units
Kilobit (kb)
A kilobit represents 1,000 bits (decimal), commonly used in telecommunications and networking. Unlike computer storage, networking units generally favor decimal prefixes, making kilobits distinct from kibibits (1024-bit units). Kilobits are often used to express low-bandwidth data rates—such as early dial-up Internet speeds (e.g., 56 kbps), small sensor networks, or radio telemetry. Though kilobits appear small today, many communication systems still operate efficiently at kilobit speeds, especially low-power IoT devices designed for long battery life and minimal bandwidth usage.
Kilobyte (kB)
A kilobyte traditionally represents 1,024 bytes (2¹⁰), reflecting binary-based memory design. Historically, operating systems, RAM modules, and floppy disks all used the binary kilobyte because memory addressing naturally aligned with powers of two. Kilobytes were once considered large: early computer programs and operating systems were measured in just a few kB. The first text-based adventure games fit entirely within 32 kB. Although kilobytes seem tiny today, they remain important for low-level embedded systems, boot loaders, configuration memory, and microcontrollers. The kilobyte is a reminder of computing's early constraints and the precision of binary address spaces.