ISP Jargon Buster Home

Kbps (thousands of bits per second / Kilobits per second) is a measure of bandwidth (the amount of data that can flow in a given time) on a data transmission medium.

To better understand how this works we must use an example, such as a document file sized 20K. Typically the 'K' stands for KiloBytes (or in transfer terms KBps – note the uppercase B [Bytes] vs lowercase b [bits]).

Most good 56Kbps modem connections will be able to transfer at a rate of 5/6KBps, thus a 20K document would take just 4 seconds to download. We could get into the whole issue surrounding compression, but that would only serve to confused matters.

You should now be able to comprehend the difference between a typical 56Kbps dialup modem and a 512Kbps (roughly ten times faster) broadband ADSL link. Hold in mind that most e-mail's are 30 to 100K in size, with a single web page being anything from 30 to 200K per page.

To round things off: 2 x 512Kbps = 1Megabit per second (Mbps).

Related Articles:

> Bits

> Gbps - Gigabits Per Second

> Dialup

> Modem