| Yottabits per second (Ybit/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|
| 1 Yottabit per second | 867361.737988 Eibit/s |
| 2 Yottabits per second | 1734723.47598 Eibit/s |
| 3 Yottabits per second | 2602085.21397 Eibit/s |
| 4 Yottabits per second | 3469446.95195 Eibit/s |
| 5 Yottabits per second | 4336808.68994 Eibit/s |
| 10 Yottabits per second | 8673617.37988 Eibit/s |
| 20 Yottabits per second | 17347234.7598 Eibit/s |
| 25 Yottabits per second | 21684043.4497 Eibit/s |
| 50 Yottabits per second | 43368086.8994 Eibit/s |
| 100 Yottabits per second | 86736173.7988 Eibit/s |
| Reference | Yottabits per second (Ybit/s) | Exbibits per second (Eibit/s) |
|---|---|---|
| A dial-up modem | 5.6 × 10-20 Ybit/s | 4.85723 × 10-14 Eibit/s |
| Typical home broadband | 1 × 10-16 Ybit/s | 8.67362 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
| Gigabit Ethernet | 1 × 10-15 Ybit/s | 8.67362 × 10-10 Eibit/s |
| Streaming a 4K film | 2.5 × 10-17 Ybit/s | 2.1684 × 10-11 Eibit/s |
The yottabit per second is a unit of data transfer rate equal to a thousand zettabits per second. Its symbol is Ybit/s. For thirty years it was the largest rate the metric system could name, and it describes a speed that has no application anywhere: not in engineering, not in research, and not in any forecast that anyone takes seriously.
Its distance from reality is easy to state. Global internet traffic averages roughly one exabit per second, so a yottabit per second is about a million times the combined communication of the entire human species. The largest single link ever built runs at a few hundred terabits per second, which is a ten-billionth of this figure.
The unit is nonetheless properly defined, and that completeness is the point. The metric system's rule is that every prefix combines with every unit without exception, so a reader who has never seen Ybit/s can decode it from the prefix alone. A system with gaps would need a table of which combinations are legal, and a table is exactly what a rule-based system exists to avoid.
There is a physical way to think about the number. A yottabit per second is 125 zettaoctets per second, and the total quantity of data humanity has ever stored is a few hundred zettaoctets. A link at this rate would therefore transmit the entire accumulated information of the species in a couple of seconds. No such body of data exists in one place to be sent, and nothing at the far end could receive it.
The prefix yotta was adopted in 1991 alongside zetta, at a conference that also had to consider which letters remained free. It stood at the top of the metric ladder until 2022, when ronna and quetta were added above it, partly because data quantities were beginning to approach the old ceiling. Rates have not followed quantities upward at the same pace.
For a converter, handling the unit is a matter of consistency rather than utility. A tool that converts every metric prefix correctly does not need to decide which of them anyone will use, and a figure written in yottabits per second — however unlikely — converts by the same rule as any other.
One yottabit per second equals 1,000 zettabits per second, 125 zettaoctets per second, or about 0.8272 yobibits 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.