| Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Petabits per second (Pbit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Exbibit per second | 1152.92150461 Pbit/s |
| 2 Exbibits per second | 2305.84300921 Pbit/s |
| 3 Exbibits per second | 3458.76451382 Pbit/s |
| 4 Exbibits per second | 4611.68601843 Pbit/s |
| 5 Exbibits per second | 5764.60752303 Pbit/s |
| 10 Exbibits per second | 11529.2150461 Pbit/s |
| 20 Exbibits per second | 23058.4300921 Pbit/s |
| 25 Exbibits per second | 28823.0376152 Pbit/s |
| 50 Exbibits per second | 57646.0752303 Pbit/s |
| 100 Exbibits per second | 115292.150461 Pbit/s |
| Reference | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) | Petabits per second (Pbit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s | 5.6 × 10-11 Pbit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.0000001 Pbit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s | 0.000001 Pbit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s | 0.000000025 Pbit/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 petabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand terabits per second. Its symbol is Pbit/s. It marks the frontier of optical transmission research: the rate at which laboratories have carried data down a single strand of glass, and which no deployed system yet approaches.
The records were set by combining three techniques. Multi-core fibre puts several separate light-guiding paths inside one cladding, so that a single strand behaves like a bundle. Wavelength division multiplexing runs hundreds of distinct colours down each of those cores. Advanced modulation encodes many bits into each pulse. Multiplying the three together is what reaches a petabit per second.
Such demonstrations run over tens of kilometres of fibre in controlled conditions, not the thousands of kilometres a working sea cable must span. Distance is the hard part: signals attenuate, dispersion smears pulses together, and non-linear effects in the glass grow with power. Every kilometre added makes the same rate harder to sustain, which is why deployed cables sit two orders of magnitude below the laboratory record.
In octets a petabit per second is 125 teraoctets per second, which is roughly the storage of a hundred and twenty-five large hard drives moved every second. Nothing at either end of such a link could produce or absorb data at that rate; the figure describes the medium's capacity rather than any use of it.
At the network level the unit is used for aggregates. The total interconnect capacity of a very large data centre, the summed capacity of all the cables landing on a continent, and the peak traffic of the largest content networks are quoted in petabits per second. These are sums over thousands of links, not the rating of any one.
The trajectory is worth noting. Transoceanic capacity has grown by roughly a factor of ten every seven or eight years for several decades, driven almost entirely by better electronics and better coding rather than by more glass. If that continues, the petabit per second will describe a working cable within a generation.
One petabit per second equals 1,000 terabits per second, 125 teraoctets per second, or about 0.8882 pebibits per second.