megabits

Megabit is a unit of digital information equal to 1,000,000 bits. In most contexts related to data transfer, it is abbreviated Mb and defined in decimal terms. In binary usage, the same quantity is sometimes called a mebibit (Mibit) and equals 1,048,576 bits, though this binary term is less common in everyday networking.

Megabits per second, abbreviated Mbps, measure data transfer speed. Internet service providers commonly advertise speeds in Mbps, and actual throughput depends on factors such as network congestion, hardware, and protocol overhead. One megabit per second corresponds to about 125,000 bytes per second, or roughly 0.125 megabytes per second, using decimal byte definitions.

Megabits differ from megabytes. A megabyte equals eight megabits. Therefore, to estimate file transfer times or data volumes from a speed, divide by eight. For example, a 50 Mbps link could deliver about 6.25 MB per second under ideal conditions, and a 100 Mbps link about 12.5 MB/s.

Confusion can arise from unit prefixes. Mbps uses decimal bits, while binary prefixes would use mebibits (Mibit) and mebibytes (MiB). To avoid ambiguity, many sources specify Mbps for speed and MB or MiB for size. In practice, megabits are most commonly used to describe network speeds, while megabytes are used for file sizes and storage capacities.