How to Calculate Transfer Rate
Transfer rate is the approximate amount of data transmitted from one computer to another over a given frame of time. Despite the seeming simplicity of this process, modern computer networking hardware calculates data transfer in bits, while computer operating systems calculate file size in bytes. This disparity leads to the need for a calculation to convert the reported network transfer rates from bits per second into bytes per second.
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Instructions
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Locate the transfer speed attained in the data transfer software you are using. For example, when downloading a file from the Internet using Internet Explorer, a dialog box appears that reports the transfer speed during that file download.
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Divide the total number of bits per second by eight. This converts the bit units into byte units.
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Determine the unit of bytes you wish to use as the base unit for calculation. A kilobyte equals 1024 bytes, a megabyte equals 1024 kilobytes and a gigabyte equals 1024 megabytes. Every increase in size is an increase in magnitude by one. That is, every increase in size increases the exponent that 1024 must be raised to by 1. A kilobyte, or 1024 bytes, raised to the second power is a megabyte, whereas 1024 bytes raised to the third power is a gigabyte.
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Divide the number of bytes by 1024 raised to the magnitude of the unit of choice. For example, calculating the transfer rate of 2,048,000 bytes to megabytes, a one magnitude increase over kilobytes, one would divide 2,048,000 by 1024 to the second power or 2,048,000/1024^2. This calculation gives the number of megabytes transferred at that point in time.
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