In telecommunications and computing, bit rate (sometimes written bitrate) is the frequency at which bits are passing a given (physical or metaphorical) "point". It is quantified using the bit per second (bit/s) unit.

While often referred to as "speed", bit rate does not measure distance/time but number of bits/time, and thus should be distinguished from the "propagation speed" (which depends on the transmission medium and has the usual physical meaning).

Usage notes

The formal abbreviation for "bit per second" is "bit/s" (not bits/s). In less formal contexts the abbreviatons b/s or bps are often used, though this risks confusion with "bytes per second" (B/s). Even less formally, it is common to drop the "per second", and simply refer to "a 128 kilobit audio stream" or "a 100 megabit network".

"Bit rate" is sometimes used interchangeably with "baud rate", which is only the same if each bit occurs in a unit interval.

For large bitrates, SI prefixes are used, not binary prefixes:

There are typically eight bits in a byte (octet), but communications data rates are almost never expressed in bytes per second, with the notable exceptions of disk and memory I/O transfer rates. To convert from byte/s to bit/s, simply multiply by 8. Divide by 8 to go the other way.

Using binary prefixes, these rates take on different conversions:

Examples

If lossy compression is used on audio/visual data, differences from the original signal will be introduced in the form of compression artifacts. Whether these affect the subjective quality, and if so how much, depends on the compression scheme, encoder power, the characteristics of the input data, and the listener's familiarity with artifacts; experts may detect artifacts in many cases in which the average listener would not.

The bitrates in this section are approximately the minimum that the average listener (when using state-of-the-art compression) would consider not significantly worse than the reference standard:

Audio

• 4 kbit/s – minimum necessary for recognizable speech (using special-purpose speech codecs)
• 8 kbit/s – telephone quality
• 32 kbit/s – MW quality
• 96 kbit/s – FM quality
• 128 kbit/s – CD quality

Video

• 32 kbit/s – videophone quality (minimum necessary for a recognizable talking head)
• 2 Mbit/s – VHS quality
• 8 Mbit/s – DVD quality
• 55 Mbit/s – HDTV quality

Notes

Note that because of advancing technology, the actual bitrates used by some of the compared-to devices is significantly higher. For example:

• Telephone circuits using μlaw – 64 kbit/s
• CDs using CDDA – 1.4 Mbit/s

Bandwidth conversion

Allow easy conversion from kbit/s to MB/h to GB/day to TB/month to ...

• webair.com
• forret.com

References

• Federal Standard 1037C
• MIL-STD-188

See also

• Data transfer rate
• Clock rate
• Throughput
• Bandwidth
• Constant bit rate
• Variable bit rate
• Average bit rate
• Available bit rate
• List of device bandwidths
• Telecommunication