Talk:Data rate units

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[edit] Page creation

This page was created to merge all the articles like kilobit per second and mebibit per second. A merge was discussed a few times on pages like Talk:Bit_rate#Merge_of_bit.2Fs_articles and Talk:Kilobit_per_second#Merge_into_Bit_rate.3F and was supported, but no one got around to it.

I think it's important that, no matter how we arrange this page, clicking a link like kilobit per second should take you directly to a definition of the unit (through a redirect to an anchor link in the merged page). Whether that anchor link is a section header or part of a table, though, is up for discussion. — Omegatron 02:07, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

I think this is a great start. I've avoided past discussion because there were too many articles involved.

As someone with a TRANSMISSION background, I have always seen transmission system rates discussed in some form of "decimal prefix bits" / second - never bytes, never binary prefixes. Also, rates always referred to the "line rate" as opposed to the "data transfer rate", when talking about the transmission system. When talking about COMPUTER SYSTEM data transfer rates, I understand and agree with the use of bytes and binary prefixes. This perspective makes comments like "Bytes are typically used in modern systems" and "1536k T1 — 1,536,000 bit/s (1.536 Mbit/s)" wrong. In the former case, bits are still predominantly (exclusively?) used in modern systems and in the latter case, the correct T1 rate is 1.544 Mbit/s. Does anyone else share this line of thought? Bellhead (talk) 02:32, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Yes. "Mbit/s" always means 1,000,000 bits per second. It is not subject to the computer science ambiguity.

File transfer, though, is often in bytes; KB/s or whatever, which is ambiguous and means different things in different contexts.

To my knowledge, no one ever uses Kibit/s (or "binary kilobits per second") for anything. Only byte rates are expressed as binary multiples. — Omegatron 01:20, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

I noticed that the VHS/DVD/HDTV data rates in the megabit per second section were in Mbytes/s - different to the Mbits/s used in the surrounding text. I checked the data rates for DVD here [1], and found DVD to be 8Mbits/s as opposed to 8Mbytes/s in the text. Also, for HDTV I found a data rate of 27Mbit/s here [2]. With VHS I wasn't sure - isn't it an analog format?? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.168.20.32 (talk) 05:00, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bandwidths

Instead of listing examples here, should we just link to List of device bandwidths? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Omegatron test account (talk • contribs) 06:44, 17 January 2008 (UTC)