Tech
Bandwidth Calculator
Convert any bandwidth between bps, kbps, Mbps, Gbps, Tbps and their byte-rate counterparts. Compute total data moved per second, minute, hour, day, week, or month, and see the connection tier from dial-up to multi-gigabit.
Bandwidth calculator
Lowercase b is bits, uppercase B is bytes. 1 byte = 8 bits.
Window used to compute total data moved at this rate.
Total moved over the period
12.5 MB
Class: High-speed
Bit rates
- bps
- 100,000,000 bps
- kbps
- 100,000 kbps
- Mbps
- 100 Mbps
- Gbps
- 0.1 Gbps
Byte rates
- B/s
- 12,500,000 B/s
- KB/s
- 12,500 KB/s
- MB/s
- 12.5 MB/s
- GB/s
- 0.0125 GB/s
Frequently Asked Questions about the Bandwidth Calculator
What is the difference between Mbps and MB/s?
A lowercase b is bits and an uppercase B is bytes, and 1 byte equals 8 bits. So 100 Mbps (megabits per second) is 100 / 8 = 12.5 MB/s (megabytes per second). ISPs quote line speed in bits per second because that is how network hardware is specified; download managers and file transfer UIs show bytes per second because that is how file sizes are measured. The calculator converts in both directions automatically.
Does this use decimal (1000) or binary (1024) prefixes?
Decimal throughout. 1 kbps is exactly 1,000 bps, 1 Mbps is 1,000,000 bps, and 1 GB/s is 1,000,000,000 B/s. That matches every ISP plan, every IEEE Ethernet spec, and every NIC datasheet. Storage capacity is often binary (1 KiB = 1,024 bytes, 1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes), but bandwidth has always been quoted in decimal SI units, so the two should not be mixed.
How does a monthly data cap relate to a Mbps speed?
Divide the cap by the seconds in 30 days (2,592,000) to get a sustained byte rate, then multiply by 8 to get bits per second. A 1 TB (1,000,000 MB) cap works out to about 3.09 Mbps held flat 24/7. A 1.2 TB cap is about 3.7 Mbps sustained. That is why a single 4K stream at ~25 Mbps can hit a household cap inside a few hundred hours of viewing per month.
What does a gigabit connection actually deliver?
A marketed 1 Gbps line tops out around 940 Mbps of usable TCP throughput, which is about 117 MB/s. The missing ~6% goes to Ethernet framing, the TCP/IP headers, ACK packets, and the encoding overhead of the physical layer. The bandwidth calculator shows the raw line rate; subtract roughly 5 to 7% to estimate real-world file transfer speed on a wired connection.
Why does my download UI show MB/s while my ISP advertises Mbps?
Two reasons. First, file sizes are measured in bytes, so any UI displaying a file's progress naturally divides by 8 to match the file's unit. Second, the smaller number looks worse in marketing copy: 12.5 MB/s sounds slower than 100 Mbps even though they are the same speed. Use the calculator to compare apples to apples by entering the rate in either unit and reading the converted value.