Megabit

This article is about the unit of 10⁶bits. For the unit of 2²⁰bits, seemebibit.

Not to be confused withmegabyte.

Multiple-bit units
Decimal Value Metric 1000 kbit kilobit 10002 Mbit megabit 10003 Gbit gigabit 10004 Tbit terabit 10005 Pbit petabit 10006 Ebit exabit 10007 Zbit zettabit 10008 Ybit yottabit 10009 Rbit ronnabit 100010 Qbit quettabit	Binary Value IEC Memory 1024 Kibit kibibit Kbit Kb kilobit 10242 Mibit mebibit Mbit Mb megabit 10243 Gibit gibibit Gbit Gb gigabit 10244 Tibit tebibit — 10245 Pibit pebibit — 10246 Eibit exbibit — 10247 Zibit zebibit — 10248 Yibit yobibit — — —
Orders of magnitude of data

Themegabitis a multiple of the unitbitfor digitalinformation.The prefixmega(symbol M) is defined in theInternational System of Units(SI) as a multiplier of 10⁶(1 million),and therefore

1 megabit =10⁶bits=1000000bits= 1000kilobits.

The megabit has the unit symbolMbitorMb.The lowercase 'b' in Mb distinguishes it from MB (formegabyte).

The megabit is closely related to themebibit,a unit multiple derived from thebinary prefixmebi(symbol Mi) of the same order of magnitude,which is equal to2²⁰bits=1048576bits,or approximately 5% larger than the megabit. Despite the definitions of these new prefixes for binary-based quantities of storage by international standards organizations, memory semiconductor chips are still marketed using themetric prefixnames to designate binary multiples.

Using the commonbytesize of eight bits and the standard decimal definition of megabit and kilobyte, 1 megabit is equal to 125kilobytes(kB) or approximately 122kibibytes(KiB).

The megabit is widely used when referring to data transfer rates of computer networks ortelecommunicationssystems. Network transfer rates and download speeds often use the megabit as the amount transferred per time unit, e.g., a 100Mbit/s(megabit per second) Fast-Ethernetconnection, or a 10 Mbit/s Internet access service, whereas the sizes of data units (files) transferred over these networks are often measured in megabytes. To achieve a transfer rate of one megabyte per second one needs a network connection with a transfer rate of eight megabits per second.

Usage

• Intelecommunications,the base 10 definition of the unit (one million bits) is standard.
• In the semiconductor industry, it is still common practice to designaterandom-access memory(RAM),read-only memory(ROM) in a binary interpretation of the metric prefixes, such as the megabit, so that one megabit represents2²⁰bits=1048576bits.For example, a single discrete DDR3 chip specified at "512 Mb" contains 2²⁹bits =536870912bits= 512 Mibit (approximately 536.87 Mbit) of storage,or671088648-bit bytes,variously referred to as either 64mebibytesor 64 (binary)megabytes.
• During the16-bit game console era,the megabit (Mb) was a commonly used measure of the size (computer data storagecapacity) of game cartridges. This size represented onemebibit(Mibit). The vast majority ofSNESandMega Drive(Genesis) games were produced on 8megabitcartridges, although other sizes such as 4, 12, 16, 24, 32, and 48 Mb cartridges appeared. This usage continued on theNintendo 64,with cartridge sizes ranging between 32 and 512 Mb.