| Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Gigabits per second (Gbit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbibit per second | 1152921504.61 Gbit/s |
| 2 Exbibits per second | 2305843009.21 Gbit/s |
| 3 Exbibits per second | 3458764513.82 Gbit/s |
| 4 Exbibits per second | 4611686018.43 Gbit/s |
| 5 Exbibits per second | 5764607523.03 Gbit/s |
| 10 Exbibits per second | 11529215046.1 Gbit/s |
| 20 Exbibits per second | 23058430092.1 Gbit/s |
| 25 Exbibits per second | 28823037615.2 Gbit/s |
| 50 Exbibits per second | 57646075230.3 Gbit/s |
| 100 Exbibits per second | 115292150461 Gbit/s |
| Reference | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Gigabits per second (Gbit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s | 0.000056 Gbit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.1 Gbit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s | 1 Gbit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.025 Gbit/s |
The exbibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to two to the sixtieth power bits per second, which is 1,024 pebibits per second. Its symbol is Eibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the exabit per second, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
That fifteen per cent is more than the margin most engineering work allows anywhere. A quantity stated in the wrong convention at this level is not slightly imprecise but plainly wrong, and no amount of context recovers the intended figure once it has been written ambiguously. This is the situation the IEC prefixes were introduced to prevent.
No physical link approaches this rate. The unit describes aggregates: the total instantaneous traffic of the whole internet is roughly an exabit per second, so a binary exbibit per second is fifteen per cent more than everything moving on every network on the planet at a given moment.
Where a binary figure of this size arises naturally is in address arithmetic rather than in transmission. Two to the sixtieth is a number that appears throughout the design of 64-bit systems, and any rate derived from filling or traversing such an address space in a fixed time is naturally binary. Those calculations are theoretical, but they are the reason the unit is defined rather than left unnamed.
In octets an exbibit per second is 144,115,188,075,855,872, or 128 pebioctets per second. That is more storage moved per second than the world manufactures in several years, which is a way of saying that no source and no destination for such a flow could exist.
For a converter the treatment is mechanical and must be exact. Eibit/s and Ebit/s differ by an eighth, and a tool that treats them as interchangeable has introduced an error larger than the difference between many neighbouring units. The lowercase i is not decoration.
One exbibit per second equals 1,024 pebibits per second, 144,115,188,075,855,872 octets per second, or about 1.153 exabits per second.
The gigabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to one thousand million bits per second. Its symbol is Gbit/s, often written Gbps. It names the standard of wired local networking and, increasingly, of domestic fibre connections.
Gigabit Ethernet was standardised in 1998 for optical fibre and in 1999 for ordinary twisted-pair copper, and the copper version is what made it universal. It runs a hundred metres over the same cabling that carried the hundred-megabit standard before it, which meant buildings could be upgraded by replacing equipment rather than wiring. That single property fixed the gigabit as the default connection for a generation.
In octets a gigabit per second is 125 megaoctets per second. That is roughly the speed of a good mechanical hard drive and well below a modern solid-state drive, which is why gigabit networking is no longer the bottleneck it once was: the network can now outrun the storage at one end or the other in many common setups.
Domestic fibre services advertise a gigabit routinely, and the figure has become a marketing threshold more than a technical one. Practically no household can saturate it — a gigabit is enough for around two hundred simultaneous high-definition video streams — and the benefit in daily use is not throughput but the absence of congestion, which keeps latency low and steady.
Above the gigabit the ladder continues in the same steps. Ten-gigabit Ethernet is standard between servers and switches in data centres; twenty-five, forty, hundred and four-hundred-gigabit links join racks, buildings and cities. Each is a multiple of the same unit, and each is still counted in bits per second because that is what the optics and the copper actually carry.
Wireless has followed. The later wireless local network standards quote peak rates above a gigabit per second, though those figures assume a single device, ideal conditions and the full width of the channel. Real wireless throughput in a normal home is typically a third to a half of the advertised peak, and the gap widens with every additional device.
One gigabit per second equals 1,000,000,000 bits per second, 125 megaoctets per second, or about 0.9313 gibibits per second.