A gigabit per second (Gbps or Gbit/s) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,000 megabits per second or 1,000,000 kilobits per second or 1,000,000,000 bits per second.

Only a few applications utilize speeds measured in Gbit/s:

• Gigabit Ethernet, 1 Gbit/s
• 10-gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gbit/s
• SCSI & Fibre Channel hard drives
• OC-24, a 1.244 Gbit/s SONET data channel
• OC-192, a 9.953 Gbit/s SONET data channel, the fastest in current use

Related units

---

Another unit of data transmission is the gigabyte per second (GB/s, GBps, or Gbyte/s). As "gigabyte" has two possible meanings, the relation of Gbit/s to GB/s can be either of the following:

• Where 1 gigabyte is considered 1,000,000,000 bytes
  • 1 gigabyte per second = 8 Gbit/s.
• Where 1 gigabyte is considered 1,073,741,824 bytes (as in computer file storage)
  • 1 gigabyte per second ≈ 8.59 Gbit/s.

Because of this discrepancy, the use of "bit-rates" is strongly recommended for all discussions of data transfer speeds, as bits per second (bps) is standardized on base-10 numbers.

Another related unit is the gibibit per second:

10⁹ bit/s = 1,000,000,000 bit/s = 1 Gbit/s (one gigabit or one billion bits per second)

2³⁰ bit/s = 1,073,741,824 bit/s = 1 Gibit/s (one gibibit per second)

See also

---

• gigabit/gibibit
• gigabyte/gibibyte

External links

---

• Gigabit — searchNetworking.com Definitions

Telecommunications terms | Units of flow

Gigabits por segundo | Gigabit per secondo | Gigabit per second | Gbps