Theoretical Data Transfer Speeds

Subject: [Follow up] Summary of different device, etc. speeds
From: "Cannon and Nicole Smith" <can-nyk@agt.net>
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 00:40:04 +1100
 
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Shane's Antler!
My own personal thanks to all who contributed to
this! You guys (generic) SHINE!!  :)
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First a big thank you to all who pointed me to an article or gave me
information directly.  I had a LOT to wade through and try to match up.  I
thought this would make a nice little project and as you can see, it turned
into something fairly large.  I need to put a bit of a disclaimer in here
since there was a little bit of conflicting information between different
sources so I took the liberty of putting down what made sense to me.  Also,
I haven't even heard of many of these technologies so I wasn't able to
realize if they made sense of not.  And some of the technologies seemed to
have different designations for the same thing, but I was never 100% sure.
And lastly, as I read in one article, we have to remember that this is the
theoretical throughput, not counting stop bits, parity bits, headers,
compression of data, line static, etc.  Anyway, this was very interesting
and useful to me and hopefully it will be useful to others as well.  If
anyone sees some mistakes I've made (typing or otherwise), please let me
know.  Thanks.
 
Cannon Smith
 
-  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -
 
First, a bit (pun intended :) )  to understand the notation used; watch
uppercase and lowercase.
 
1 bit is either a zero or a one
1 byte is 8 bits (the amount of bits needed to represent a character on a
page)
 
Most of the time in computerdom, each prefix is 1024 of the previous prefix.
For example, 1 Kb is 1024 bits and 1KB is 1024 bytes. 1 Mb is 1024 Kb  and 1
MB is 1024 KB.  There has seemed to be a bit of a movement toward rounding
this off to 1000 instead of 1024 at times, so keep this in mind when reading
these symbols in some places.
 
ps as in Kbps is for per second (Kilobits per second).
baud is equal to bps (bits per second)

Here's the list.  In the end I decided to sort it by relative data transfer
rate (speed).  Oh, I decided to add some raw speeds at the beginning to show
the difference between bps and Kbps, etc.

P.S.
I haven't tried to give credit to all the sources but I should mention a lot
of the info did come from:
<http://www.whatis.com/Flat_Files/The_Speed_of/0,282006,,00.html>;
This site also explains (briefly) what each technology is used for.