Bit Per Second (bit/s)
The basic unit of data rate: one bit transferred each second.
The bit per second is the reference unit for data transfer rate on this site.
About the bit per 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.
Sources: Wikipedia: Bit (origin of the term); Wikipedia: Bit rate; Wikipedia: Baud
Bit Per Second conversion chart
1 bit per second expressed in every other data transfer rate unit:
| Unit | 1 bit per second |
|---|---|
| Kbps | 0.001 |
| Mbps | 0.000001 |
| Gbps | 1×10⁻⁹ |
| MB/s | 1.25×10⁻⁷ |
| Tbps | 1×10⁻¹² |
| B/s | 0.125 |
| KB/s | 0.000125 |
| GB/s | 1.25×10⁻¹⁰ |
| MiB/s | 1.192092896×10⁻⁷ |
| Kibit/s | 0.0009765625 |
| Mibit/s | 9.536743164×10⁻⁷ |
| Gibit/s | 9.313225746×10⁻¹⁰ |
| KiB/s | 0.0001220703125 |
| GiB/s | 1.164153218×10⁻¹⁰ |
More Computing units
- kilobit per second (data transfer rate)
- megabit per second (data transfer rate)
- gigabit per second (data transfer rate)
- terabit per second (data transfer rate)
- byte per second (data transfer rate)
- kilobyte per second (data transfer rate)
- megabyte per second (data transfer rate)
- gigabyte per second (data transfer rate)
- kibibit per second (data transfer rate)
- mebibit per second (data transfer rate)
- gibibit per second (data transfer rate)
- kibibyte per second (data transfer rate)
- mebibyte per second (data transfer rate)
- gibibyte per second (data transfer rate)
- bit (digital storage)
- nibble (digital storage)
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