Bits per second in the context of "Throughput"

A communication channel refers either to a physical transmission medium such as a wire, or to a logical connection over a multiplexed medium such as a radio channel in telecommunications and computer networking. A channel is used for information transfer of, for example, a digital bit stream, from one or several senders to one or several receivers. A channel has a certain capacity for transmitting information, often measured by its bandwidth in Hz or its data rate in bits per second.

Communicating an information signal across distance requires some form of pathway or medium. These pathways, called communication channels, use two types of media: Transmission line-based telecommunications cable (e.g. twisted-pair, coaxial, and fiber-optic cable) and broadcast (e.g. microwave, satellite, radio, and infrared).

In a digitally modulated signal or a line code, symbol rate, modulation rate or baud is the number of symbol changes, waveform changes, or signaling events across the transmission medium per unit of time. The symbol rate is a kind of aperiodic frequency, measured in baud (Bd) or symbols per second. In the case of a line code, the symbol rate is the pulse rate in pulses per second. Each symbol can represent or convey one or several bits of data. The symbol rate is related to the gross bit rate, expressed in bits per second.

In telecommunications, data rate units are commonly multiples of bits per second (bit/s) and bytes per second (B/s). For example, the data rates of modern residential high-speed Internet connections are commonly expressed in megabits per second (Mbit/s).They are used as units of measurement for expressing data transfer rate, the average number of bits (bit rate), characters or symbols (symbol rate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system.