Gbits

Gbits is a term used to refer to gigabits, a unit of information equal to 1,000,000,000 bits. In practice, gigabits appear both as a quantity of data (how many bits are stored or transmitted) and as a data transfer rate (bits per second). The standard abbreviation for a single gigabit is Gb, and for a speed it is Gbps; the plural form “Gbits” is not standard technical usage but may appear in general writing.

One gigabit per second (1 Gbps) equals 10^9 bits per second. In terms of data rate, this translates to about 125 megabytes per second (MB/s) when using decimal units, or about 119.2 mebibytes per second (MiB/s) when using binary mebibyte units. Gigabits are commonly used to describe network speeds, such as Gigabit Ethernet, which delivers up to 1 Gbps, and higher-speed links like 2.5, 5, and 10 Gbps.

There is a related consideration for binary prefixes: a gibibit (Gibit) denotes 2^30 bits and is used in some technical contexts to distinguish from the decimal gigabit. In everyday networking, gigabits are usually understood in decimal terms.

In data storage, bits and bytes are related by the fact that 1 byte equals 8 bits, so data sizes in gigabits should be divided by 8 to obtain gigabytes. The term Gbits thus intersects with both data capacity discussions and throughput measurements.

See also: megabit, gigabit Ethernet, gigabit network, Gbps, Mbps, data transfer rate, data size.