Treating bit and byte as the same

A bit and a byte are two spellings of the same quantity.

1 byte = 8 bits. The factor is exact, not rounded.

In everyday speech both terms are used interchangeably because practically only byte quantities appear in daily use. Bits show up almost exclusively in transmission rates — but there they appear constantly.

If a figure is a rate per second and written with a lower-case b, it is bits. Storage and file sizes, by contrast, are practically always given in bytes.