Definition

Number of bits transmitted per second.

SOURCE: ISO/IEC 18000-2:2009: Information technology — Radio frequency identification for item management — Part 2: Parameters for air interface communications below 135 kHz. International Organization for Standardization, Geneva, Switzerland.

Introduction

Bit rate refers to the number of bits that are conveyed or processed per unit of time. Bit rate is measured in bits per second (symbol: bit/s). For example, a transmission or processing task that handles one byte per second (1 B/s) has a bit rate of 8 bit/s. The non-standard abbreviation "bps" is often used to replace the standard symbol.

Source: Wikipedia contributors, "Bit rate," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bit_rate&oldid=940727810 (accessed February 20, 2020).

Calculating bit rate

Bit rate can be calculated with the following formula: bit rate = sample rate x bit depth x number of channels

For example, CD-DA audio streams are two channels of 16-bit audio with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz. The bit rate of CD-DA audio can be calculated as: 2 x 16 x 44,100 = 1,411,200 bit/s

Bit rate measurements are usually represented with SI prefixes (base 10), such as kilo, mega, giga, and tera. 1,411,200 bit/s can be represented as 1.4 Mbit/s or 1,411.2 kbit/s. With non-standard abbreviations, this would be 1.4 Mbps or 1411.2 kbps.

Bit rate indicates the amount of digital storage required to store one second of music. The total size in bits of a CD-DA stream can be calculated as: 2 x 16 x 44,100 x length of time in seconds

The total number of bytes can be calculated by dividing the size in bits by 8 (the number of bits in one byte): size in bytes = size in bits/8

Related terms

Bit

Byte