What Are Mbits and How Many Does a Cell Phone Need?

Mobile internet is standard in Switzerland. Limited national data volumes are increasingly rare, and most people surf the web via LTE or 5G throughout their day-to-day lives. However, the high priority given to internet connections for smartphones also means that, as a customer, you have to consider the connection speed when choosing a plan. This is usually indicated in the offers with “Mbits” and, of course, providers outdo each other with the maximum speed advertised. In everyday use, however, both the demand of a smartphone and the speed actually achieved usually look different.

‘Mbits’, or ‘Mbit/s’, stands for ‘megabits per second’ and describes the number of ‘bits’ that are transmitted per second during a data connection. A ‘bit’ is the smallest possible unit of a data set, i.e. a single binary number. This is also where the word ‘bit’ comes from (from the English ‘binary digit’).

The ‘M’ or ‘mega’ in ‘Mbits’ is a prefix for units of measurement that indicates that it is a million times the specified value. 1 Mbit is therefore 1,000,000 bits and 1 Mbit/s means a transmission speed of 1,000,000 bits per second.

The size of photos, videos or apps on your phone is usually not given in bits, but in bytes. A typical photo on a smartphone is 2.6 megabytes (MB) in size. A byte consists of a group of 8 bits. With an Mbit/s, you can transfer 125,000 bytes per second or 0.125 MB. With such a connection, it would take about 21 seconds to transfer the 2.6 MB photo.

With all this knowledge about bits and bytes, you may not yet be able to imagine exactly how fast the data connection would feel in everyday use. Typical scenarios and a few reference values may help here. As a reference for the speed, we assume the 30 Mbit/s of our Flat Mobile cell phone subscription.

This results in a transfer rate in megabytes (MB) of 3.75 MB/s.

With the 30 Mbit/s you can, for example:

How fast your connection needs to be depends, of course, on your expectations and usage habits. However, for the majority of users, a speed of 30 Mbit/s is sufficient for mobile applications.

In addition, there is the fact that mobile connections are always subject to certain fluctuations and, depending on the location, can be restricted by buildings or even the weather. On average, you can achieve a minimum speed of between 10 and 50 Mbit/s in most places in Switzerland via mobile networks, regardless of the provider.

If you mainly use your smartphone for typical smartphone applications such as messaging, video and audio streaming, and surfing the net, 30 Mbit/s is more than enough and you won’t notice any speed fluctuations in most places (except for dead zones).