| Tebibits per second (Tibit/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Tebibit per second | 0.000000953674316406 Eibit/s |
| 2 Tebibits per second | 0.00000190734863281 Eibit/s |
| 3 Tebibits per second | 0.00000286102294922 Eibit/s |
| 4 Tebibits per second | 0.00000381469726562 Eibit/s |
| 5 Tebibits per second | 0.00000476837158203 Eibit/s |
| 10 Tebibits per second | 0.00000953674316406 Eibit/s |
| 20 Tebibits per second | 0.0000190734863281 Eibit/s |
| 25 Tebibits per second | 0.0000238418579102 Eibit/s |
| 50 Tebibits per second | 0.0000476837158203 Eibit/s |
| 100 Tebibits per second | 0.0000953674316406 Eibit/s |
| Reference | Tebibits per second (Tibit/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.0000000509317 Tibit/s | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0000909495 Tibit/s | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.000909495 Tibit/s | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.0000227374 Tibit/s | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
The tebibit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,099,511,627,776 bits per second, which is 1,024 gibibits per second. Its symbol is Tibit/s. It is the binary counterpart of the terabit per second, and the two differ by 10 per cent.
Ten per cent is the point at which the distinction becomes a matter of money rather than of pedantry. A supplier quoting a system at a hundred terabits per second and a customer measuring a hundred tebibits per second are not describing the same performance, and the difference is ten terabits — more than most organisations' entire external connectivity.
The rate belongs to the interior of very large machines. The aggregate memory bandwidth of a rack of accelerators, or the internal switching capacity of a large network chip, reaches this range, and both are built from power-of-two structures: memory channels of fixed binary width, switch ports in powers of two, buffers sized in binary. Expressing their totals with binary prefixes preserves the arithmetic that produced them.
In octets a tebibit per second is 137,438,953,472, or 128 gibioctets per second. That is more than any single storage device can supply and more than any external cable carries. It is a figure that describes something happening inside a cabinet, between chips connected by short traces on a board, where the physical distance is measured in centimetres.
Optical research also brushes this range. A laboratory demonstration carrying a petabit per second down one fibre is a thousand times higher, but individual wavelength channels and the electronics driving them work at tebibit-scale aggregates, and papers reporting them often state the binary figure because the underlying frame sizes are binary.
The habit of writing the lowercase i is worth keeping even where the reader is unlikely to check. A number written unambiguously can be converted correctly by anyone who reads it later; one written ambiguously cannot be repaired, and at ten per cent the ambiguity is no longer harmless.
One tebibit per second equals 1,024 gibibits per second, 137,438,953,472 octets per second, or about 1.100 terabits per second.
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.