Megabit Per Second (Mbps)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,000,000 bits per second. The unit of internet connection speeds; 8 Mbps is 1 MB/s.

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

1 megabit per second = 1,000,000 bits per second

About the megabit per second

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.

Sources: Wikipedia: Bit rate (Ethernet, Wi-Fi and streaming rates); NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples; Wikipedia: Megabit

Megabit Per Second conversion chart

1 megabit per second expressed in every other data transfer rate unit:

Unit1 megabit per second
Bps1,000,000
Kbps1,000
Gbps0.001
MB/s0.125
Tbps0.000001
B/s125,000
KB/s125
GB/s0.000125
MiB/s0.1192092896
Kibit/s976.5625
Mibit/s0.9536743164
Gibit/s0.0009313225746
KiB/s122.0703125
GiB/s0.0001164153218

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