Definition of Mbps (Megabits per second, Mbit/s)

Mbps stands for Megabits per second, also abbreviated Mbit/sec, although the international notation suggests *Mb/s. One Mbps is equal to one million bits (or 1000 kbit) transferred per second.

It is usually used to measure the speed of a connection such as the Internet or to measure video quality. Technically it is not appropriate to treat this unit as a measure of speed, it is actually a measure of throughput or data transmission flow.

* We must clarify that Mb/s is not the same as MB/sec, in the latter case it is megabyte per second.

1 Mbps or Mb/s or Mbit/s or megabit per second is equal to:

1,000,000 bits per second
1,000 kilobits per second
125,000 bytes per second
125 kilobytes per second

Internet speed in mbps (badly called mega)

The speed of the Internet is usually advertised and the non-technical public is simply called «mega». For example, when an advertisement for internet services says «Speed ​​of 6 megabytes», it is actually referring to 6 mbps. NOT at 6 megabytes per second (which would be a lot more).

It is not well used, because «mega» technically means a million. There is no other unit there to tell us what it is. It could be megacycle, megahertz, megabyte, etc.

When performing a test or internet connection speed test, it will give us a value. We must look at what unit this value is found in. To transform it to kbps we must multiply it by 1000. If we want to transform from mbps to MB/sec (megabyte per second) it is divided by 8. Examples:

Connection speed: 10 mbps

Connection speed in kbps: 10×1000 = 10000 kbps
Connection speed in MB/sec: 10/8 = 1.25 MB/sec
Connection speed in KB/sec: 10x(1000/8) = 1250 KB/sec.

For more information read: Conversions between mbps/kbps, and mb/kb.

See also kbps.

Internet connection speed

Read the article: Why is my internet speed slow?

Mbps in video

In videos, the data rate is usually expressed in Mb/sec (megabit per second), for example:

0.032 Mbit/s (32 kbit/s): This is videophone quality, much lower.
2 Mbit/s: equivalent to the quality of a VHS
8 Mbit/s: Equivalent to the quality of a DVD video.
55 Mbit/s: equivalent to HD television quality

Mbps in audio

In audio, a typical audio CD, without compression, has a flow rate of 1.41 Mbit/s (net flow, without redundancy to detect errors or other ancillary information), while if we include all the data it is 1.94 Mbit/s. /s.

Bit Transfer Multiples

– bps (bit per second)

– kbps (kilobit per second) = 1000 bits per second = 125 bytes per second

– mbps (megabit per second) = 1,000,000 bits per second = 1,000 kbps = 125,000 bytes per second = 125 kilobytes per second

– gbps (gigabit per second) = 1,000,000,000 bits per second = 1000 mbps = 125 megabytes per second

– tbps (terabit per second) = 1,000,000,000,000 bits per second = 1000 gbps = 125 gigabytes per second