Kilobit per second
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A kilobit per second (kbit/s or kbps) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,000 bits per second. It is sometimes used to mean 1,024 bits per second, using the binary meaning of the kilo- prefix, though this is rare and non-standard.
Examples:
Most digital representations of audio are measured in kbit/s:
(These values vary depending on audio data compression schemes)
- 4 kbit/s – minimum necessary for recognizable speech (using special-purpose speech codecs)
- 8 kbit/s – telephone quality
- 32 kbit/s – MW quality
- 96 kbit/s – FM quality
- 192 kbit/s – "CD quality" for an mp3
- 1,411 kbit/s – CD audio (at 16-bits and 44.1 kHz)
Related units
Another unit of data transmission is the kilobyte per second (kbyte/s or kB/s or kBps), which is 1,000 or 1,024 bytes per second. Bytes are typically 8 bits in modern systems, but even when 8-bit bytes are used, the number of kbyte/s is not necessarily exactly one eighth the number of kbit/s because the count of bytes might not include framing bits. For example, a 56 kbit/s RS-232 serial line transfers only 5.6 kbyte/s — not 7 kbyte/s — when used in the most common configuration (asynchronous, 8 data bits, no parity, one stop bit). It is fairly common to use kbyte/s with the binary meaning (1,024 byte/s) — more so than for kbit/s — perhaps because of the close relationship with the common binary usage of kilobyte for measuring file sizes.Another related unit is the kibibit per second:
- 103 = 1,000 bit/s = 1 kbit/s (one kilobit or one thousand bits per second)
- 210 = 1,024 bit/s = 1 Kibit/s (one kibibit per second)
See also
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