communications, unit (Or "data ransfer rate", "transmission
rate") The amount of
data transferred per second by a
communications channel or a computing or storage device.
When applied to data rate, the multiplier
prefixes "kilo-",
"mega-", "giga-", etc. (and their abbreviations, "k", "M",
"G", etc.) always denote powers of 1000. For example, 64 kbps
is 64,000 bits per second. This contrasts with units of
storage where they stand for powers of 1024, e.g. 1 KB = 1024
bytes.
(2002-03-23)