Conventions
By convention, bus and network data rates are denoted either in bit/s (bits per second) or byte/s (bytes per second). In general, parallel interfaces are quoted in byte/s and serial in bit/s. The more commonly used is shown below in bold type.
On devices like modems, bytes may be more than 8 bits long because they may be individually padded out with additional start and stop bits; the figures below will reflect this. Where channels use line codes (such as Ethernet, Serial ATA and PCI Express), quoted rates are for the decoded signal.
The figures below are simplex data rates, which may conflict with the duplex rates vendors sometimes use in promotional materials. Where two values are listed, the first value is the downstream rate and the second value is the upstream rate.
All quoted figures are in metric decimal units, where:
- 1 byte (B) = 8 bit
- 1 kbit/s = 1,000 bit/s
- 1 Mbit/s = 1,000,000 bit/s
- 1 Gbit/s = 1,000,000,000 bit/s
- 1 kB/s = 1,000 byte/s
- 1 MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s
- 1 GB/s = 1,000,000,000 byte/s
- 1 TB/s = 1,000,000,000,000 byte/s
Note that this goes against the traditional use of binary prefixes for memory size. These decimal prefixes have long been established in data communications. This occurred before 1998 when IEC and other organizations introduced new binary prefixes and attempted to standardize their use across all computing applications.
Read more about this topic: List Of Device Bit Rates
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