Prefixes
When quantifying large bit rates, SI prefixes (also known as Metric prefixes or Decimal prefixes) are used, thus:
| 1,000 bit/s | rate = 1 kbit/s (one kilobit or one thousand bits per second) |
| 1,000,000 bit/s | rate = 1 Mbit/s (one megabit or one million bits per second) |
| 1,000,000,000 bit/s | rate = 1 Gbit/s (one gigabit or one billion bits per second) |
Binary prefixes have almost never been used for bit rates, although they may occasionally be seen when data rates are expressed in bytes per second (e.g. 1 kByte/s is sometimes interpreted as 1000 Byte/s, sometimes as 1024 Byte/s). A 1999 IEC standard (IEC 60027-2) specifies different abbreviations for Binary and Decimal (SI) prefixes (e.g. 1 kiB/s = 1024 Byte/s = 8192 bit/s, and 1 MiB/s = 1024 kiB/s), but these are still not very common in the literature, and therefore sometimes it is necessary to seek clarification of the units used in a particular context.
Read more about this topic: Bit Rate