Mibit/s to Bps (Mibit/s to bit/s)

1 mebibit per second equals 1,048,576 bits per second exactly.

1 mebibit per second = 1,048,576 bits per second

How to convert mebibits per second to bits per second

To convert mebibits per second to bits per second, multiply the number of mebibits per second by 1,048,576. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bits per second by 9.536743164×10⁻⁷ (rounded).

bits per second = mebibits per second × 1,048,576

Example: 10 mebibits per second = 10,485,760 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

Mebibit Per Second (Mibit/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

1,048,576 bits per second.

Mebibits per second sit one binary step above the kibibit and measure the speeds of links and streams when a strict power of two is wanted. Mebi comes from mega with the same bi ending, and the quantity is 2 to the power 20, or 1,048,576. The IEC prefixes were meant to end a long confusion in computing, where kilo, mega and giga had been used for powers of 2 even though the SI gives them powers of 10.

The arithmetic is simple. One mebibit per second is 1,048,576 bits per second, which equals 131,072 bytes per second and is about 4.86 percent more than a decimal megabit per second. Wikipedia's article on data-rate units notes that decimal prefixes are typically used for data rates, so the mebibit per second is a precise but uncommon alternative. The IEEE adopted the prefix names in 1996 with the symbols Ki, Mi and Gi, and its standard 1541-2002 became a full-use standard in 2005.

1 mebibit per second = 1,048,576 bits per second (exactly).

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

Bit Per Second (bit/s)

ComputingCurrent unit

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

See all data transfer rate units.