What Is the Difference Between Mbps and MBps?

Posted by Mgbenka at Wednesday, March 21, 2012 |

MBps is an abbreviation for Megabytes per second, whereas Mbps is an abbreviation for megabits per second. Eight megabits equal one Megabyte. These abbreviations are commonly used to specify how much data can be transferred per second between two points. In some cases, mbps is used as an abbreviation for megabits per second; however, the lowercase m technically means "milli" not "mega," so it doesn't really mean the same thing.
To put megabits and Megabytes in perspective, let's back up for just a moment. One bit of data is a single "on" or "off" digit, a one or zero. It takes eight bits to represent a single character, or one byte of data.

• 8 bits = 1 byte
• 1000 bytes = 8 kilobits (kb) = 1 Kilobyte (KB)
• 1000 Kilobytes (KB) = 8 megabits (Mb) = 1 Megabyte (MB)

As a point of possible confusion it should be mentioned that there are two different systems for calculating multiples of data: the decimal system as noted above, and the binary system.