I noticed while testing bandwidth that the traffic generator seems to count Mbps as a power of 10, 1000 instead of the more traditional power of 2, 1024. It was slightly confusing to see the bandwidth number sent on the Mikrotik being noticeably larger than what was shown on our backhaul radios.

Is this convention followed throughout RouterOS? I typically operate under the 1024 convention unless dealing with hard drives. Are networking units now going with the 1000 measure as well? I find it off putting, but maybe that's just because I've worked with computers for so long that powers of 2 make so much more sense given the way computers operate.

Yes it is in SI system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_rate_units

Telecommunications have used SI units/powers for as long as I remember

Interesting. I checked speedtest.net and it seems to use power of 2. Google's speedtest seems to agree with speedtest.net.

So was it the case with IDSN and T1 lines that they use power of 10 when when coming up with 64kbps and 1.54Mbps?

Also, one other area I noticed discrepancies is when uploading files to do upgrades. On my Mac which uses power of 10 for file sizes, the file is 16.4MB. When uploaded to the flash on the router, it's 15.6MB. Aha, lightbulb! I just noticed it's not MB, but MiB. Which is the newer unit.

It would be nice if the units would stay consistent. Anyway, not a big deal if it's all as designed, but I just needed to be disabused of my mistaken assumptions, and that would explain why we have to configure more bandwidth than expected for the user to see the results they expect when using speedtest.net or similar tools.