Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no addre

Data rates are almost always multiplied by powers of 10, because they're based on symbol/clock rates which tend to be related to powers of 10. There's no address lines, etc, to push us to powers of 2 (though we may get a few powers of 2 from having a power of 2 number of possible symbols). So telco rates which are multiples of 56000 or 64000; baud rates which are multiples of 300; ethernet rates which are mostly just powers of 10; etc etc etc. Of course, there's occasional weird stuff, but usually things have a lot of factors of 5 in there and seem more "decimal-ish" than "binary-ish".