Normal world things usually scales by unit. You can have 1 apple, 3 apples, or 10 apples, so the shortcuts for amounts of digits matter. In the digital world,

Normal world things usually scales by unit. You can have 1 apple, 3 apples, or 10 apples, so the shortcuts for amounts of digits matter. In the digital world, a lot of things scale by powers of two. You can't have 2 isolated bits. You have 1 byte (that is 8 bits), the numbering system used to put addresses is based on powers of two (1 byte can be used to tell between 256 addresses, because that is 2^8, then 2, 4 and more bytes) and a lot of bases for packing information followed or required that (like storage, with 512 or 2048 bytes per sector). The kilobyte was then the closest binary number closer to 1000 (2^8 * 4 = 2^10) so from there it was the standard for scaling and you get a kilobyte of kilobytes as 1 gb (2^20) and 1 kilobyte of megabytes 1gb (2^30). With networking it is a bit different, because down to the layer 1, you don't transfer whole bytes, but bits. And you have things like stop bits, parity bits, frames, retries and so on that mess a bit when you are talking about individual bits or higher level of abstraction bytes, but as it is close enough for big numbers you can usually consider that for transferring 1 byte you transferred 10 bits, and more or less match the power of 10 network speed with the amount of (byte packed) information you transferred. In any case, switching measuring units for things that scale in binary, bytes and higher, to things that scale in individual bits is more a common marketing reason than a technical one. You get the next big number just taking out a letter that most don't notice from your unit name.