Kbps to Gibit/s

1 kilobit per second equals 9.313225746×10⁻⁷ gibibits per second (rounded).

1 kilobit per second = 9.313225746×10⁻⁷ gibibits per second

How to convert kilobits per second to gibibits per second

To convert kilobits per second to gibibits per second, multiply the number of kilobits per second by 9.313225746×10⁻⁷. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply gibibits per second by 1,073,741.824.

gibibits per second = kilobits per second × 9.313225746×10⁻⁷

Example: 10 kilobits per second = 0.000009313225746 gibibits 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

Kilobit Per Second (kbps)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000 bits per second. Used for voice calls and low-rate links.

Kilobit rates belong to the age of telephone wires. In 1962 AT&T introduced the Bell 103A, a full-duplex modem that sent 300 bit/s over ordinary phone lines, and by 1976 the Bell 212A had reached 1,200 bit/s. Speeds then climbed in steps through the 1990s, until the V.90 standard approved in 1998 offered 56 kbit/s downstream, with 33.6 kbit/s going the other way. That ceiling defined the dial-up era for many home users.

A kilobit per second is 1,000 bit/s, using the standard SI meaning of kilo, and it is still the natural unit for anything lightweight. A digital voice channel using PCM takes 64 kbit/s. MP3 files are often encoded at 128 kbit/s as a mid-range setting, with 320 kbit/s the highest the format supports. Divide by eight to get bytes: 8 kbit/s is 1 kB/s, so a 56 kbit/s modem moves about 7 kB/s, and fetching a 1 MB file over it would take roughly two and a half minutes.

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

Sources: Wikipedia: Modem (Bell 103, 212A, V.90 history); Wikipedia: Bit rate (voice and MP3 rates); Wikipedia: Kilobit

Gibibit Per Second (Gibit/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,073,741,824 bits per second.

At more than a billion bits each second, the gibibit per second suits fast storage buses and memory links. Its value is 1,073,741,824 bits per second, the product of 2 to the power 30, and it is about 7.4 percent larger than the decimal gigabit per second. Dividing by 8 gives 134,217,728 bytes per second, the figure Wikipedia lists for this unit.

The name was coined in the mid 1990s. A committee of IUPAC proposed kibi, mebi, gibi and tebi in 1995 as contractions of kilobinary, megabinary, gigabinary and terabinary. The IEEE then took the idea to ISO and the IEC and changed the symbols to the two-letter forms still used, so the unit is written Gibit/s. ISO 80000-1 defined the prefixes in 2009. Because the prefixes sit outside the SI, vendors of networking gear usually still quote plain gigabits, and Gibit/s mainly appears in technical specifications.

1 gibibit per second = 1,073,741,824 bits per second (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Binary prefix; Wikipedia: Data-rate units; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples

Related conversions

See all data transfer rate units.