Tbps to B/s
1 terabit per second equals 125,000,000,000 bytes per second exactly.
How to convert terabits per second to bytes per second
To convert terabits per second to bytes per second, multiply the number of terabits per second by 125,000,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply bytes per second by 8×10⁻¹².
bytes per second = terabits per second × 125,000,000,000
Example: 10 terabits per second = 1,250,000,000,000 bytes 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
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
Byte Per Second (B/s)
Eight bits per second.
Byte is a younger word than bit. Werner Buchholz coined it in June 1956 during the early design of the IBM Stretch computer, deliberately spelling it with a y so that nobody would mistake it for bit. At first it had no fixed size, and Stretch's early design allowed groups of one to six bits. Eight-bit bytes were then built into Stretch, and IBM's System/360 spread them widely in the 1960s. Another person, Louis Dooley, has also claimed to have coined the term at MIT Lincoln Laboratory around 1956 or 1957.
A byte per second is eight bits per second, the smallest rate counted in bytes. Protocol documents that need to avoid any ambiguity often use the word octet for exactly eight bits. The unit is tiny by modern standards. On serial links, start, stop and parity bits mean the line must run at a higher bit rate than the byte rate alone suggests.
1 byte per second = 8 bits per second (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Byte; Wikipedia: Bit rate; Wikipedia: Data-rate units
Related conversions
- B/s to Tbps (reverse)
- Tbps to bps
- Tbps to Kbps
- Tbps to Mbps
- Tbps to Gbps
- Tbps to MB/s
- Tbps to KB/s
- Tbps to GB/s
- Tbps to MiB/s
- Bps to B/s
- Kbps to B/s
- Mbps to B/s
- Gbps to B/s
- MB/s to B/s
- KB/s to B/s
- GB/s to B/s
- MiB/s to B/s
See all data transfer rate units.