Mbps to Tbps
1 megabit per second equals 0.000001 terabits per second exactly.
How to convert megabits per second to terabits per second
To convert megabits per second to terabits per second, multiply the number of megabits per second by 0.000001. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply terabits per second by 1,000,000.
terabits per second = megabits per second × 0.000001
Example: 10 megabits per second = 0.00001 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
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
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 Mbps (reverse)
- Mbps to bps
- Mbps to Kbps
- Mbps to Gbps
- Mbps to MB/s
- 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
- Bps to Tbps
- Kbps to Tbps
- Gbps to Tbps
- MB/s to Tbps
- B/s to Tbps
- KB/s to Tbps
- GB/s to Tbps
- MiB/s to Tbps
See all data transfer rate units.