Home Page : Glossary : "B" : BPS

Brian Cryer's Glossary of IT Terms with Links

BPS

bps

Bits Per Second. Also known as bit rate. Used when specifying connection speeds across networks.

When calculating the maximum throughput across a network remember that network communications itself has some overhead, so as a rule of thumb therefore divide by 10 to get the number of bytes that this equates to. For typical connection speeds this equates to:

Speed	Maximum achievable throughput
28.8Kbps	2.8 K-bytes per second
56Kbps	5.6 K-bytes per second
10Mbps	976 K-bytes per second (almost 1MB a second)
100Mbps	9.5 M-bytes per second (almost 10MB a second)

Actual throughput rates may be less than this because of other factors such as other network traffic.