Gbit

Gbit is the common abbreviation for gigabit, a unit of information equal to one billion bits (10^9 bits) in the decimal system. It is widely used to express data transfer rates and network bandwidth. In networking and communications literature, data rates are often written as Gbit/s or Gbps, for example a 1 Gbit/s Ethernet connection.

One gigabit per second corresponds to about 125 megabytes per second of data, since 1 byte consists of 8 bits. Specifically, 1 Gbit/s = 1,000,000,000 bits per second = 125,000,000 bytes per second. In practice, real-world throughput is lower due to protocol overhead, latency, and hardware efficiency. Gigabit speeds are common in consumer and enterprise networks, with higher speeds such as 2.5, 5, and 10 Gbit/s available in many settings, and even higher rates used in data centers and backbones.

The term Gbit can be confused with binary prefixes. Some contexts distinguish gibibit (2^30 bits) from the decimal gigabit, though the latter is far more prevalent for network bandwidth. For clarity, many sources use Gbit/s or Gbps to denote decimal gigabits per second, while GiB or GiB/s would indicate gibibytes or gibibytes per second in binary terms.

Gbit contrasts with gigabyte (GB), where one byte equals eight bits. In storage and memory contexts, bytes are the standard unit, so 1 GB equals 8 Gbit. When discussing data rates, however, the bit-based gigabit is the typical measure.