What Is Data Transfer Rate?

Date First Published: 21st April 2022

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Data Transmission Technologies

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

CONTENTS

How To Calculate Data Transfer Rate?
Is Data Transfer Rate The Same As Bandwidth?
What Has An Effect On Data Transfer Rate?

Learn more about what data transfer rate is in this article.

Data transfer rate is a measure of the speed that a network device can send data. It specifies the amount of data that can be transferred from one place to another per second. For example, Cat 5 Ethernet cables are capable of providing a data transfer rate of up to 100 Mb/s. Data transfer rate is measured in bits, kilobits, megabits, and gigabits per second.

Note:

The measurements of data transfer rate are often confused with the measurement of storage capacity (bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes), but they are not the same. A byte is eight times bigger than a bit. For example, if an ISP provided a data transfer rate of 50 Mb/s, it would only be capable of transferring 6.25 megabytes per second as 50 ÷ 8 is 6.25.

How To Calculate Data Transfer Rate?

Data transfer rate can be calculated using the formula:

Data transfer rate = Amount of data ÷ number of seconds.

For example, 7 MB of data was transferred and it took 1.5 seconds for that data to be transferred.

7 ÷ 1.5 = 4.67 (rounded to 2 decimal places)

In order to get that in megabits, it needs to be multiplied by 8.

4.67 x 8 = 37.36 Mb/s

Data transfer rate = 37.36 Mb/s

Is Data Transfer Rate The Same As Bandwidth?

Data transfer rate is not to be confused with bandwidth. Bandwidth is a measure of the number of bits that can be sent or received per second (transmission capacity) and data transfer rate is a measure of how fast data is transferred from one point to another. Higher bandwidth will result in a higher data transfer rate.

What Has An Effect On Data Transfer Rate?

The factors that have an effect on data transfer rate are:

Network congestion .
The available bandwidth on a home or business network.
The number of users connected to the network. More users will slow the network down, causing the data transfer rate to be dropped.
The network and upload speed of an internet connection.
The network technology. For example, Ethernet cables have a limit on the amount of data they can transfer at a time.
The maximum speed supported by a wireless router or network adapter.