| Tebibits per second (Tibit/s) | Zebioctets per second (Zio/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Tebibit per second | 1.16415321827 × 10-10 Zio/s |
| 2 Tebibits per second | 2.32830643654 × 10-10 Zio/s |
| 3 Tebibits per second | 3.49245965481 × 10-10 Zio/s |
| 4 Tebibits per second | 4.65661287308 × 10-10 Zio/s |
| 5 Tebibits per second | 5.82076609135 × 10-10 Zio/s |
| 10 Tebibits per second | 0.00000000116415321827 Zio/s |
| 20 Tebibits per second | 0.00000000232830643654 Zio/s |
| 25 Tebibits per second | 0.00000000291038304567 Zio/s |
| 50 Tebibits per second | 0.00000000582076609135 Zio/s |
| 100 Tebibits per second | 0.0000000116415321827 Zio/s |
| Reference | Tebibits per second (Tibit/s) | Zebioctets per second (Zio/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 0.0000000509317 Tibit/s | 5.92923 × 10-18 Zio/s |
| Typical home broadband | 0.0000909495 Tibit/s | 1.05879 × 10-14 Zio/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 0.000909495 Tibit/s | 1.05879 × 10-13 Zio/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 0.0000227374 Tibit/s | 2.64698 × 10-15 Zio/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 zebioctet per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,024 exbioctets per second, or two to the seventieth power octets per second. Its symbol is Zio/s. It is the binary counterpart of the zettaoctet per second, and the two differ by 18.1 per cent.
A link running at this rate would transfer everything humanity has ever stored several times over in a single second. That is the plainest way to describe how far it lies beyond anything that exists, is planned, or has been seriously proposed. The unit is a name for a quantity, not a description of a thing.
It is worth being precise about why such names are still defined. A measurement system is a set of rules, and the value of a rule is that it applies without exception. The moment a system says that certain prefix-and-unit combinations are legal and others are not, every user must carry a table instead of a rule, and different users will carry different tables. Complete definition is cheaper and safer.
The physical obstacles are not merely large but qualitative. At a zebioctet per second, the energy needed to switch the required number of states, even at the thermodynamic minimum, becomes a substantial power; the practical figure for real electronics is many orders of magnitude above that; and the number of parallel channels required exceeds anything that could be built and cooled. These are not engineering targets.
The 18.1 per cent gap from the decimal unit continues the pattern that runs through the whole binary series. Each step multiplies the discrepancy by 1.024, so a convention that was harmless at the kibioctet has become, by this point, a difference no reader could overlook. Making that visible is the purpose the IEC prefixes serve.
In practice, a converter meets this unit only in a complete table or in a document exploring theoretical limits. Handling it correctly costs nothing and demonstrates that the tool applies its rules uniformly, which is the property that makes its ordinary answers trustworthy.
One zebioctet per second equals 1,024 exbioctets per second, 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 octets per second, or about 1.181 zettaoctets per second.