Terabit Per Second (Tbps)

ComputingCurrent unit

10¹² bits per second. The scale of backbone and undersea cables.

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

1 terabit per second = 1,000,000,000,000 bits per second

About the terabit per second

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.

Sources: Wikipedia: Submarine communications cable; Wikipedia: Terabit Ethernet; NIST: Metric (SI) prefixes

Terabit Per Second conversion chart

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

Unit1 terabit per second
Bps1,000,000,000,000
Kbps1,000,000,000
Mbps1,000,000
Gbps1,000
MB/s125,000
B/s125,000,000,000
KB/s125,000,000
GB/s125
MiB/s119,209.2896
Kibit/s976,562,500
Mibit/s953,674.3164
Gibit/s931.3225746
KiB/s122,070,312.5
GiB/s116.4153218

More Computing units

All Computing units

Browse all data transfer rate units.