Tag: GB

What are bytes as in kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes?
A byte is a unit of data or information, the same as a gram is a unit of weight.
Lets say one letter of the alphabet takes 1 byte to store or transmit, then a tightly written
page with 1000 letters (words) would be 1 kilobyte. One thousand such pages in a book
would be 1 Megabyte, and a 1000 of these books in a library would be 1 Gigabyte. That is a
lot of reading material.
Images are also taking up bytes, but each image is divided into small sections called pixels
that can be different colours. An average photo taken by a phone uses about 3 MB
(megabytes) to store or transmit. So to fill up our library with 1 GB (gigabyte) of images
would only take about 300 pictures, versus the huge amount of text stored in the same
space.
Videos use more again, as every second of video shows many images in quick succession,
and your average movie uses about 4GB per hour. In our library example that would only
be about 15 minutes of video in the same space as the 1000 books or the 300 pictures.
These numbers influence how much you can store on your phone or computer and also,
how much you can download or view with the data plan you have purchased.
So for example if your phone has a monthly mobile data allowance of 12GB, you can
probably do all the texting, emailing and internet browsing you want without running out of
data (see the huge book library above). You can even look at grumpy cat pictures without
making too much of a dent in it. But if you start watching videos, you will run out of data
quite quickly. And it doesn’t matter so much whether you are watching the video on
something like YouTube, or just get presented with video advertising on Facebook; it is all
lots of data being used up.
Please remember, the numbers used here are just examples for illustration, in real life it is
much more complicated, but the ratios of text, vs image, vs video are useful to remember.