| Gigabits per second (Gbit/s) | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Gigabit per second | 1.08420217249 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 2 Gigabits per second | 2.16840434497 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 3 Gigabits per second | 3.25260651746 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 4 Gigabits per second | 4.33680868994 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 5 Gigabits per second | 5.42101086243 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| 10 Gigabits per second | 0.00000000108420217249 Eio/s |
| 20 Gigabits per second | 0.00000000216840434497 Eio/s |
| 25 Gigabits per second | 0.00000000271050543121 Eio/s |
| 50 Gigabits per second | 0.00000000542101086243 Eio/s |
| 100 Gigabits per second | 0.0000000108420217249 Eio/s |
| Reference | Gigabits per second (Gbit/s) | Exbioctets per second (Eio/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.000056 Gbit/s | 6.07153 × 10-15 Eio/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.1 Gbit/s | 1.0842 × 10-11 Eio/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1 Gbit/s | 1.0842 × 10-10 Eio/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.025 Gbit/s | 2.71051 × 10-12 Eio/s |
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.
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.