To understand how fast a Mbps is, it may be a good idea to start by understanding the term Mbps.
Mbps is the unit used to measure the upload and download speed of data of your internet connection. Mbps is the abbreviation for Megabits per second.
A Megabit (Mb) is not the same as a Megabyte (MB). Bits are typically used to measure data transfer and Bytes for are used to measure file size.
As you have probably heard before, data is a lot of ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Each of these is a bit. A byte on the other hand consists of 8 bits.
This means that if your internet download speed is 8Mbps (8 Megabits per second), you can download 1MBps. (1 Megabyte per second)
So Mbps indicates how many bits can be uploaded or downloaded per second. For us as users we may rather want to know how long it will take to upload or download a file of a certain size.
As an example, from our table below, with a speed of 25 Mbps you can transfer 3.125 Megabytes of data per second, and it will take 5 minutes and 43 seconds to transfer 1GB.
If you are streaming a movie, it will download while you are watching, so unless you have very slow internet, you won’t even notice it.
To stream a full HD movie, it can be done with an internet speed as low as 4Mbps. For Ultra High Definition movie streaming, on the other hand, you would need an internet speed starting at around 25Mbps.
With that said, keep in mind that this is if only one device is streaming at a time. If you have more than one device on the same internet connection, you will have to take that into consideration when deciding on what internet speed you will need.
To determine what will be a good internet speed for you, you can use the calculator by AT&T
You may also find our article about the speed of Data in Optical fiber cable interesting, as the servers that we download from, may be halfway around the world from us.
Mbps internet speed vs Download time
People often ask how many Mbps is a GB. Because Mbps is transfer speed in bits per seconds and GB is file size in bytes, the answer is not that simple. The short answer is that to transfer 1 GB in 1 second, you would need an internet speed of 8000 Mbps.
To give you a better understanding of how Mbps correlate to file size we included this table that compares Mbps vs MBps vs GBps. We also included columns to show how long it will take to upload or download 1 GB at various Mbps internet connection speeds.
Mbps internet speed Table
| Speed in Mbps | Megabytes per second | Time to download 1GB |
| 1 | 0.125 | 02:23:09 |
| 5 | 0.625 | 00:28:37 |
| 10 | 1.25 | 00:14:18 |
| 15 | 1.875 | 00:09:32 |
| 25 | 3.125 | 00:05:43 |
| 30 | 3.75 | 00:04:46 |
| 50 | 6.25 | 00:02:51 |
| 80 | 10 | 00:01:47 |
| 100 | 12.5 | 00:01:25 |
| 150 | 18.75 | 00:00:57 |
| 200 | 25 | 00:00:42 |
| 300 | 37.5 | 00:00:28 |
| 400 | 50 | 00:00:21 |
| 500 | 62.5 | 00:00:17 |
| 600 | 75 | 00:00:14 |
| 700 | 87.5 | 00:00:12 |
| 800 | 100 | 00:00:10 |
| 900 | 112.5 | 00:00:09 |
| 1000 | 125 | 00:00:08 |