Gigabits per second to megabytes per second converter
Convertersconversion pair
Convert Gbps to MB/s instantly: 1 Gbps is 125 MB/s. Why a gigabit line downloads at an eighth of the number on the box.
a gigabit sounds like a gigabyte until the download bar disagrees.
work surface
Math, not advice — results are indicative.Read the disclaimer.
pro tips
A gigabit link is not a gigabyte per second. It is 125 MB/s, and that is still fast enough to copy a DVD in under a minute.
At 1 Gbps, a 1 GB file takes about eight seconds on paper; expect a little longer in real life.
If a benchmark shows 120 MB/s on a gigabit link, the network is fine and the overhead is doing its usual thing.
what it does
One gigabit per second equals 125 megabytes per second. The gigabit is a bit-rate, the megabyte is a byte-rate, and the factor of eight turns one into the other before the prefixes even meet.
This is the number that separates a gigabit fibre plan from the file manager's report. The line is genuinely fast; the download bar is simply counting in a larger unit. Nothing has been throttled by the time you see 125 instead of 1,000.
Useful anchors: 2.5 Gbps is 312.5 MB/s, 5 Gbps is 625 MB/s, and 10 Gbps is 1,250 MB/s. At those speeds the storage device often becomes the limit, which is why a fast network and a slow SSD can still feel ordinary.
Type any Gbps value and the result updates in MB/s. The swap link takes you to the inverse page when you need to go from a measured copy speed back to the network figure.
quick answers
Is 1 Gbps the same as 1 GB/s?
No. 1 Gbps is 125 MB/s, or 0.125 GB/s. The two units differ by a factor of eight, and the prefixes differ by another factor of 1,000.
Why does a 10 Gbps link not copy at 10 GB/s?
Because 10 Gbps is 1,250 MB/s, not 10 GB/s. At that point the disk, the bus and the file system usually become the bottleneck.
What is a gigabit connection good for?
Large downloads, backups, multiple 4K streams and moving big files between machines. For ordinary browsing, the difference is mostly felt when several people use the line at once.