| Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Megabits per second (Mbit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbioctet per second | 9223372036855 Mbit/s |
| 2 Exbioctets per second | 18446744073710 Mbit/s |
| 3 Exbioctets per second | 27670116110564 Mbit/s |
| 4 Exbioctets per second | 36893488147419 Mbit/s |
| 5 Exbioctets per second | 46116860184274 Mbit/s |
| 10 Exbioctets per second | 92233720368548 Mbit/s |
| 20 Exbioctets per second | 184467440737096 Mbit/s |
| 25 Exbioctets per second | 230584300921369 Mbit/s |
| 50 Exbioctets per second | 461168601842739 Mbit/s |
| 100 Exbioctets per second | 922337203685478 Mbit/s |
| Reference | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) | Megabits per second (Mbit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 6.07153 × 10-15 Eio/s | 0.056 Mbit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1.0842 × 10-11 Eio/s | 100 Mbit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1.0842 × 10-10 Eio/s | 1000 Mbit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.71051 × 10-12 Eio/s | 25 Mbit/s |
The exbioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 pebioctets per second, or two to the sixtieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Eio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the exaoctet per second, and the two differ by 15.3 per cent.
No machine, network or aggregate reaches this rate. An exbioctet per second is more than eight times the total instantaneous traffic of the entire internet, and it would move the world's whole stock of stored data in a matter of minutes. The unit describes a capacity with no source that could supply it and no destination that could take it in.
Two to the sixtieth is nevertheless a familiar number in computing, because it is the size of the address space a 64-bit machine can reach in octets divided by sixteen. The same power of two turns up in filesystem limits, in memory maps and in the design of every system built on that architecture, so the quantity is well known even though no rate approaches it.
The unit exists because the IEC series was defined completely. Every binary prefix pairs with every unit, exactly as every metric prefix does, so that a reader who has never seen Eio/s can decode it from the prefix alone. A system with gaps would need a table of permitted combinations, which is precisely what a rule-based system exists to avoid.
The difference from the decimal unit is worth restating at each level because it compounds. At the kibioctet it was 2.4 per cent, here it is more than an eighth, and at the yobioctet it will be more than a fifth. That growth is the reason the binary prefixes were created, and it is why the lowercase i has to be written even in figures nobody will check.
For a converter, the treatment is mechanical: six multiplications by 1,024 from octets, or the equivalent divisions coming down. The value of doing it correctly is not that anyone will use the result, but that a tool which handles every case the same way can be trusted on the cases that matter.
One exbioctet per second equals 1,024 pebioctets per second, 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 octets per second, or about 1.153 exaoctets per second.
The megabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to one million bits per second. Its symbol is Mbit/s, often written Mbps. It is the unit in which internet connections are sold, which makes it the data unit most people encounter by name.
Because it is a decimal million and not 1,048,576, the conversion to octets is exact and easy: one megabit per second is 125 kilooctets per second, so a hundred-megabit connection delivers about 12.5 megaoctets per second at best. Anyone who watches a file transfer and does the division has understood the entire relationship between how connections are advertised and how transfers are reported.
What a household actually needs is far below what it usually buys. Standard-definition video streaming uses about 3 megabits per second, high definition about 5, and ultra-high definition about 25. A video call is around 3 to 8. A large family watching four separate high-definition streams while somebody downloads a game is using perhaps 60 megabits per second, which a hundred-megabit connection handles comfortably.
The reason to buy more capacity than that is not peak speed but behaviour under load. A link that is near its limit develops queues, and queues add delay, which shows up as stutter in video calls and lag in games. A connection with generous headroom keeps its latency low, and that is a more noticeable improvement than a higher number on a speed test.
Wired local networks pass through this range on the way up. The original Ethernet ran at 10 megabits per second, its successor at 100, and both were the standard office connection for a decade each before gigabit replaced them. Wireless standards followed the same path with a lag, and both are now measured in hundreds of megabits or in gigabits.
Real throughput is always below the nominal rate. Protocol overhead takes 5 to 10 per cent on a wired link; a shared wireless channel loses much more, because the medium is divided between all the devices using it and interference forces retransmission. A connection advertised at 100 megabits per second measured at 90 over cable and 50 over a busy wireless network is behaving normally.
One megabit per second equals 1,000,000 bits per second, 125 kilooctets per second, or about 0.9537 mebibits per second.