Bps to Tbps (bit/s to Tbps)

1 bit per second equals 1×10⁻¹² terabits per second exactly.

1 bit per second = 1×10⁻¹² terabits per second

How to convert bits per second to terabits per second

To convert bits per second to terabits per second, multiply the number of bits per second by 1×10⁻¹². This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply terabits per second by 1,000,000,000,000.

terabits per second = bits per second × 1×10⁻¹²

Example: 10 bits per second = 1×10⁻¹¹ terabits 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

Bit Per Second (bit/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

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

Terabit Per Second (Tbps)

ComputingCurrent unit

10¹² bits per second. The scale of backbone and undersea cables.

Terabit speeds appear where many signals are combined. A single optical fiber can carry dozens of wavelengths at once through dense wavelength-division multiplexing, and modern undersea cables bundle many fiber pairs, so a typical cable can carry tens of terabits per second overseas. A satellite, by comparison, typically offers about 1 Gbit/s, a ratio of more than 1,000 to 1.

One terabit per second is 10¹² bit/s, or 125 GB/s. At that rate a 25 GB Blu-ray disc worth of data would cross the link in a fifth of a second. Ethernet is moving into this range as well. IEEE approved 800 Gigabit Ethernet in February 2024 under 802.3df, and a separate project, 802.3dj, was started in November 2022 to cover 1.6 Tbit/s. Ordinary users rarely meet the unit directly, since it describes capacity shared among many people.

1 terabit per second = 1,000,000,000,000 bits per second (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Submarine communications cable; Wikipedia: Terabit Ethernet; NIST: Metric (SI) prefixes

Related conversions

See all data transfer rate units.