Data rate of a digital communications system.

The bit rate or bitrate is number of binary digits or bits transmitted per second in a digital communications system and is measured in bits per second (bps).

The maximum bit rate that can be achieved and therefore the speed with which a given data set can be transmitted is limited by the available bandwidth of a given communications system.

Common units of bit rate are kilobits per second (Kb/s) and megabits per second (Mb/s). Note that the multipliers refer to powers of 1000 not powers of 1024 as used when referring to information storage, so 1 Mb/s = 1,000,000 bits per second.

The term bit rate is also commonly used when discussing digital sampling and sample rates.