Mbps to Bps (Mbps to bit/s)
1 megabit per second equals 1,000,000 bits per second exactly.
How to convert megabits per second to bits per second
To convert megabits per second to bits per second, multiply the number of megabits per second by 1,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bits per second by 0.000001.
bits per second = megabits per second × 1,000,000
Example: 10 megabits per second = 10,000,000 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
Megabit Per Second (Mbps)
1,000,000 bits per second. The unit of internet connection speeds; 8 Mbps is 1 MB/s.
Megabits entered everyday life through Ethernet. The original 10BASE5 version arrived in 1981 at 10 Mbit/s, Fast Ethernet raised the figure to 100 Mbit/s in 1995, and wireless followed, with 802.11b offering 11 Mbit/s in 1999. Telecommunications engineers had always meant exactly one million bits per second by the megabit, while computer memory vendors were stretching the word mega toward powers of two. That divergence is part of why the IEC later published separate binary prefixes.
Internet providers still sell service in Mbit/s, which is why a plan and a download counter seem to disagree. A byte is eight bits, so 100 Mbit/s is at most 12.5 MB/s, and a 1 GB file needs about 80 seconds at that rate under ideal conditions. Streaming is far lighter: YouTube video at 1080p is listed at roughly 3 to 8 Mbit/s with H.264, and 2160p at 8 to 35 Mbit/s. Real throughput is lower than the line rate because of protocol overhead.
1 megabit per second = 1,000,000 bits per second (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Bit rate (Ethernet, Wi-Fi and streaming rates); NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples; Wikipedia: Megabit
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 Mbps (reverse)
- Mbps to Kbps
- Mbps to Gbps
- Mbps to MB/s
- Mbps to Tbps
- Mbps to B/s
- Mbps to KB/s
- Mbps to GB/s
- Mbps to MiB/s
- Mbps to Kibit/s
- Mbps to Mibit/s
- Mbps to Gibit/s
- Mbps to KiB/s
- Kbps to bps
- Gbps to bps
- MB/s to bps
- Tbps to bps
- B/s 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.