Yes, and the global internet uses IP packets whose length is measured in bytes, not bits.
On paper in an RFC, yes, displayed on the actual routing hardware as what you're pushing, no.
No, that's still bogus. The only reason the hardware guys talked about bits/s was that that was the physical line limit, and that there was no consensus about protocols, or how many bits shall constitute a byte, or how many extra bits shall accompagny(sp?) the actual data.
Nowadays bytes always have eight bits, it's always IP, and the transport is (almost) always fully efficient so that a byte/s always translates into eight bits/s.
This isn't a question of line/protocol encoding. Network hardware ships databits around agnostic of that.
There is simply no more reason to talk in bits/s at all, except that everyone is doing it.
Obviously, because backbone people buy and sell to lower ISP's/hosters in bits/sec and your home line does too. That's from the birth of the net and trickles down, the actual choice and original rationale is moot, bits is what the upstream measures things in today. When you go to quote and plug in a large and 24x7 constant bandwidth service like Tor, I2P, torrent, VPN aggregator, etc the common language is often, and more easily to them, bits/sec.
break down the TB/month my VPS provider gives me into bits/s or bytes/s. Neither is as straightforward as a decimal shift.
That's why real networks use bits/sec: it is precisely an SI prefix shift, with no 8 divisor/multiplier or 2^n involved anywhere. There's no ambiguity and no math, just simple clarity.
VPS are by definition small, oversubscribed platforms, not generally suited to large dedicated services. VPS providers generally cater to the smaller apache style bytelog counting type customer. Not the larger full on network (vpn, tor, router) customer.
And when we have people saying stuff like 'giga bits per month', it's clear that confusion is perpuating in the field quite well to the point you have no idea if they even know what their own datapoint is. Then you have to ask them to clarify their meaning, check their math, etc.
We've got 100Mbit or more nodes out there and dinky 512kbit ones or less. For easy network reference, yes, people should use bits/sec across the board here. If they insist on using Byte/sec, at least use it right with SI 10^n prefix, not IEC 2^n prefix. And don't come up with some unusual combination of prefix/time as in the OP either.
For example...
A proper IEC gibibyte = GiB = 2^30 = 1024^3 = 1073741824 for data storage, ram (binary bit handling) A proper SI gigabyte = GB = 1E9 = 1000^3 = 1000000000 for data transmission (packet counting, rocketships)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000 http://www.swedeteam.com/kibi/
Thugh they may break your broken tradition, there are current standards now, please use them.