Which unit is typically used to measure data transfer speed in networks?

• A. Gbps
• B. kBps
• C. MBps
• D. Mbps

Answer: (D)

Data transfer speed on networks is expressed in bits per second. In practice, speeds are described using megabits per second or gigabits per second, not bytes. The units that end in B (kilobytes per second or megabytes per second) represent bytes, which isn’t the standard way to measure network throughput. Among common choices, megabits per second is the typical baseline measurement for network speeds—think of speeds like 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps (which is 1000 Mbps). A higher unit like Gbps is used for very fast links, but Mbps is the standard everyday reference. So the appropriate unit is megabits per second. (Note: 1 MBps equals 8 Mbps.)