MB/s to Tbps
1 megabyte per second equals 0.000008 terabits per second exactly.
How to convert megabytes per second to terabits per second
To convert megabytes per second to terabits per second, multiply the number of megabytes per second by 0.000008. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply terabits per second by 125,000.
terabits per second = megabytes per second × 0.000008
Example: 10 megabytes per second = 0.00008 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
Megabyte Per Second (MB/s)
1,000,000 bytes per second (8 Mbps). Disk and download speeds are shown in MB/s.
Megabytes per second inherit all the confusion of the megabyte itself. The word has meant 1,000,000 bytes in networking, hard drives and DVDs, 1,048,576 bytes for memory under Microsoft Windows, and 1,024,000 bytes for the 3.5-inch floppy disk marketed as 1.44 MB, which actually held 1,474,560 bytes. In 1999 the IEC defined megabyte as 10⁶ bytes and mebibyte as 2²⁰ bytes, and by the end of 2009 the IEEE, EU, ISO and NIST had adopted that standard.
As a rate, 1 MB/s is 1,000,000 bytes per second, or 8 Mbit/s. File copies, game installers and disk benchmarks usually show MB/s, while internet plans use Mbit/s, so a 100 Mbit/s plan tops out near 12.5 MB/s. As a feel for size, about one minute of 128 kbit/s MP3 audio fits in roughly 1 MB, so a link carrying 1 MB/s moves about a minute of such audio every second.
1 megabyte per second = 8,000,000 bits per second (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Megabyte; NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples; Wikipedia: Data-rate units
Terabit Per Second (Tbps)
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
- Tbps to MB/s (reverse)
- MB/s to bps
- MB/s to Kbps
- MB/s to Mbps
- MB/s to Gbps
- MB/s to B/s
- MB/s to KB/s
- MB/s to GB/s
- MB/s to MiB/s
- MB/s to Kibit/s
- MB/s to Mibit/s
- MB/s to Gibit/s
- MB/s to KiB/s
- Bps to Tbps
- Kbps to Tbps
- Mbps to Tbps
- Gbps to Tbps
- B/s to Tbps
- KB/s to Tbps
- GB/s to Tbps
- MiB/s to Tbps
See all data transfer rate units.