B/s to Bps (B/s to bit/s)
1 byte per second equals 8 bits per second exactly.
How to convert bytes per second to bits per second
To convert bytes per second to bits per second, multiply the number of bytes per second by 8. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bits per second by 0.125.
bits per second = bytes per second × 8
Example: 10 bytes per second = 80 bits per second.
Network speeds are quoted in bits per second (lowercase b), while file sizes use bytes (uppercase B). Divide Mbps by 8 for MB/s.
About these units
Byte Per Second (B/s)
Eight bits per second.
Byte is a younger word than bit. Werner Buchholz coined it in June 1956 during the early design of the IBM Stretch computer, deliberately spelling it with a y so that nobody would mistake it for bit. At first it had no fixed size, and Stretch's early design allowed groups of one to six bits. Eight-bit bytes were then built into Stretch, and IBM's System/360 spread them widely in the 1960s. Another person, Louis Dooley, has also claimed to have coined the term at MIT Lincoln Laboratory around 1956 or 1957.
A byte per second is eight bits per second, the smallest rate counted in bytes. Protocol documents that need to avoid any ambiguity often use the word octet for exactly eight bits. The unit is tiny by modern standards. On serial links, start, stop and parity bits mean the line must run at a higher bit rate than the byte rate alone suggests.
1 byte per second = 8 bits per second (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Byte; Wikipedia: Bit rate; Wikipedia: Data-rate units
Bit Per Second (bit/s)
The basic unit of data rate: one bit transferred each second.
Before there was a bit per second, there had to be a bit. The word is a contraction of binary digit, and John W. Tukey is credited with shortening it in a Bell Labs memo dated 9 January 1947. Claude Shannon then used it in print in his 1948 paper on the mathematical theory of communication, where he credited Tukey. Counting such bits against the clock gave engineers a way to compare telegraph lines, telephone circuits and computer links with one yardstick.
Today the bit per second is the base unit for data rates, written bit/s and often shortened to bps. It is not the same thing as the baud, which counts signalling events per second. The two agree only when each signal carries exactly one bit. Ten-megabit Ethernet over twisted pair, for instance, runs at 10 Mbit/s but sends about 20 million pulses per second because of its line coding. For scale, one cited figure puts the bare minimum for recognizable speech at around 800 bit/s, far below the 64 kbit/s of an ordinary digital phone line.
The bit per second is the reference unit for data transfer rate on this site.
Sources: Wikipedia: Bit (origin of the term); Wikipedia: Bit rate; Wikipedia: Baud
Related conversions
- Bps to B/s (reverse)
- B/s to Kbps
- B/s to Mbps
- B/s to Gbps
- B/s to MB/s
- B/s to Tbps
- B/s to KB/s
- B/s to GB/s
- B/s to MiB/s
- Kbps to bps
- Mbps to bps
- Gbps to bps
- MB/s to bps
- Tbps to bps
- KB/s to bps
- GB/s to bps
- MiB/s to bps
- Kibit/s to bps
- Mibit/s to bps
- Gibit/s to bps
- KiB/s to bps
See all data transfer rate units.