Data Rate calculator
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Data rate measures the speed of digital transmission, typically in bits per second (bit/s or bps) or bytes per second (B/s). Common scales: Kbps (10³ bit/s), Mbps (10⁶), Gbps (10⁹). Network speeds use decimal prefixes by convention. 1 Mbps equals about 125 kB/s of file throughput, because 1 byte equals 8 bits.
Open the live data rate converter for any input value.
Networks measure throughput in bits per second; storage and file transfers usually measure throughput in bytes per second. The two are easy to confuse because the symbols differ by only one letter: Mbps (megabit/s) vs MBps (megabyte/s). 1 MBps equals 8 Mbps. A 100 Mbps internet plan can move about 12.5 MB/s of file data in ideal conditions, not 100 MB/s.
Internet service providers exclusively use bits per second in their marketing (it makes the number look 8× bigger). Download managers usually show bytes per second because file sizes are in bytes. The mismatch between advertised bandwidth and observed download speed is partly real (overhead, congestion) and partly the bit/byte conversion most users don't apply.
Modern home internet is typically 25 Mbps (basic) to 1 Gbps (gigabit). 4K streaming needs about 25 Mbps per stream; a household running 3 simultaneous 4K streams plus video calls and downloads benefits from at least 100 Mbps. Office and enterprise links commonly run at 10 Gbps; backbone fiber operates at 100 Gbps and higher.
Cellular standards: 4G LTE delivers 5-100 Mbps real-world; 5G sub-6 typically delivers 50-300 Mbps; 5G mmWave can hit 1-2 Gbps with line-of-sight but degrades over short distances. Older standards: dial-up was 56 kbps; early DSL was 1-3 Mbps; cable broadband ramped from 10 Mbps in the 2000s to 1+ Gbps today.
Audio: standard MP3 streaming is 128-320 kbps; CD-quality FLAC is around 1,411 kbps; lossless 24-bit high-resolution audio can hit 9,216 kbps (9.2 Mbps). Video: SD streaming is 1-3 Mbps; HD is 5-8 Mbps; 4K HDR is 15-50 Mbps depending on codec efficiency.
File transfer to a USB 3.2 Gen 2 SSD reaches about 10 Gbps theoretical, 8-9 Gbps real. Internal NVMe SSDs over PCIe 4.0 hit 64 Gbps (PCIe x4 lane), and PCIe 5.0 doubles that. The bottleneck on modern systems is rarely the storage device; it's more often the network link or the host's USB/SATA bus.
| From | Equivalent |
|---|---|
| 1 bit/s | 0.125 byte/s |
| 1 kbps (10³ bit/s) | 1,000 bit/s, 125 B/s |
| 1 Mbps | 10⁶ bit/s, 1,000 kbps, 125 kB/s |
| 1 Gbps | 10⁹ bit/s, 1,000 Mbps, 125 MB/s |
| 1 Tbps | 10¹² bit/s, 1,000 Gbps |
| 100 Mbps connection | ≈12.5 MB/s file transfer (ideal) |
| 1 Gbps connection | ≈125 MB/s file transfer (ideal) |
| 1 MB/s | 8 Mbps |
| 1 GB/s | 8 Gbps |
It isn't. 125 MB/s is exactly what 1 Gbps means after the bit-to-byte conversion (1 byte = 8 bits). 1,000,000,000 bits/s ÷ 8 = 125,000,000 bytes/s, or 125 MB/s. That's the theoretical maximum; real throughput is usually 5-15% less due to protocol overhead.
Lowercase 'b' is bits, uppercase 'B' is bytes. 1 MBps = 8 Mbps. Internet speeds use Mbps; file-transfer tools usually report MBps.
About 12.5 MB/s of file throughput. Enough to stream 4K video on multiple devices simultaneously, run video calls, and download large files at reasonable speed.
Marketing optics. A '1,000 Mbps' plan sounds 8× faster than '125 MBps' even though they're the same throughput. The bit-per-second convention is also the engineering standard for network protocols, so it has technical legitimacy.
Roughly. In casual usage they're interchangeable. In strict networking terms, bandwidth is the capacity of a link (the maximum data rate it can carry), while data rate or throughput is the rate actually being achieved at a given moment.
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