mbit

Mbit, short for megabit, is a unit of information equal to 1,000,000 bits. It is commonly used to express data transfer rates, especially network speeds, where speeds are given in megabits per second (Mbit/s or Mbps). Since eight bits make up one byte, 1 Mbit per second corresponds to about 125,000 bytes per second (approximately 125 kilobytes per second in decimal terms). If binary prefixes are considered, 1 Mebibit per second (Mibit/s) equals 1,048,576 bits per second, which is about 131,072 bytes per second (roughly 128 KiB/s).

Terminology and potential confusion are common. Some sources use the term mebibit (Mibit) to denote the binary 2^20-bit unit, with symbol Mib, while Mbit denotes the decimal 10^6-bit unit. To avoid ambiguity, it is helpful to specify whether the context uses decimal (megabit) or binary (mebibit) conventions. In most networking and consumer internet contexts, Mbit or Mbps refers to decimal megabits per second (10^6 bits per second).

Applications and related units: Mbit is primarily used for data transfer rates rather than storage, where the latter is typically described in bytes (B) or mebibytes (MiB). Related terms include Mbps (megabits per second), MBps (megabytes per second), and Mibit (mebibit) as the binary counterpart.

See also: Mbps, Mibit, Megabit per second, Byte, Kilobyte.