Bit rates | |||
---|---|---|---|
Name | Symbol | Multiple | |
bit per second | bit/s | 1 | 1 |
Decimal prefixes (SI) | |||
kilobit per second | kbit/s | 103 | 10001 |
megabit per second | Mbit/s | 106 | 10002 |
gigabit per second | Gbit/s | 109 | 10003 |
terabit per second | Tbit/s | 1012 | 10004 |
Binary prefixes (IEC 80000-13) | |||
kibibit per second | Kibit/s | 210 | 10241 |
mebibit per second | Mibit/s | 220 | 10242 |
gibibit per second | Gibit/s | 230 | 10243 |
tebibit per second | Tibit/s | 240 | 10244 |
In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (sometimes written bitrate or as a variable R) is the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time.
The bit rate is using the bits per second unit (symbol: "bit/s"), often in conjunction with an SI prefix such as "kilo" (1 kbit/s = 1000 bit/s), "mega" (1 Mbit/s = 1000 kbit/s), "giga" (1 Gbit/s = 1000 Mbit/s) or "tera" (1 Tbit/s = 1000 Gbit/s). The non-standard abbreviation "bps" is often used to replace the standard symbol "bit/s", so that, for example, "1 Mbps" is used to mean one million bits per second.
One byte per second (1 B/s) corresponds to 8 bit/s.
When quantifying large bit rates, SI prefixes (also known as metric prefixes or decimal prefixes) are used, thus:
Binary prefixes are sometimes used for bit rates . The International Standard (IEC 80000-13) specifies different abbreviations for binary and decimal (SI) prefixes (e.g. 1 KiB/s = 1024 B/s = 8192 bit/s, and 1 MiB/s = 1024 KiB/s).
In digital communication systems, the physical layer gross bitrate,raw bitrate,data signaling rate,gross data transfer rate or uncoded transmission rate (sometimes written as a variable Rb or fb) is the total number of physically transferred bits per second over a communication link, including useful data as well as protocol overhead.
In case of serial communications, the gross bit rate is related to the bit transmission time as: