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Select a measurement and convert between different units
Single conversion
To convert from Kibibit (Kib) to Bit (bit), use the following formula:
With is the ratio between the base units Bit (bit) and Kibibit (Kib).
Let's convert 5 Kibibit (Kib) to Bit (bit).
Using the formula:
Therefore, 5 Kibibit (Kib) is equal to Bit (bit).
Here are some quick reference conversions from Kibibit (Kib) to Bit (bit):
| Kibibits | Bits |
|---|---|
| 0.000001 Kib | bit |
| 0.001 Kib | bit |
| 0.1 Kib | bit |
| 1 Kib | bit |
| 2 Kib | bit |
| 3 Kib | bit |
| 4 Kib | bit |
| 5 Kib | bit |
| 6 Kib | bit |
| 7 Kib | bit |
| 8 Kib | bit |
| 9 Kib | bit |
| 10 Kib | bit |
| 20 Kib | bit |
| 30 Kib | bit |
| 40 Kib | bit |
| 50 Kib | bit |
| 100 Kib | bit |
| 1000 Kib | bit |
| 10000 Kib | bit |
For all Digital converters, choose units using the From/To dropdowns above.
A kibibit (Kib) is a unit of digital information used to measure data capacity and transmission speeds with technical precision.
It's part of a system created by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) to clear up confusion in computing.
The term "kibibit" is a combination of "kilo-binary bit."
It was created to solve the long-standing confusion between two different counting systems:
This distinction is crucial for technical accuracy in fields like software development and data storage.
While marketing for hard drives and internet speeds often uses familiar decimal prefixes (like megabit and gigabyte), technical fields rely on binary units like kibibits, mebibits, and gibibits.
For example, your computer's RAM capacity is measured in powers of two, making gibibytes (GiB) a more accurate descriptor than gigabytes (GB).
Using kibibits and other binary units eliminates ambiguity and ensures calculations for memory allocation and file sizes are precise.
It's essential to understand the size difference when comparing these units.
A single kibibit is 1,024 bits, while a kilobit is 1,000 bits.
While that 24-bit difference (about 2.4%) seems small, it becomes significant at larger scales.
This is the exact reason why your new 1 terabyte (TB) hard drive, which contains 1 trillion bytes, is reported by your operating system as only about 931 gibibytes (GiB). The manufacturer uses the decimal (base-10) definition, while your computer uses the more accurate binary (base-2) one.
A bit (short for binary digit) is the most basic unit of data in computing.
It is the smallest possible piece of information a computer can handle. Think of a bit as a tiny light switch that can only be in one of two states: on (represented by a 1) or off (represented by a 0).
Every action you perform on a computer—from typing a letter to watching a video—is made possible by billions of these switches working together.
This simple on/off system, known as the binary system, is the fundamental language of all modern digital devices.
The word "bit" is a portmanteau, a blend of the words "binary digit."
It was coined by the brilliant mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon in his groundbreaking 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication."
Shannon, often called the "father of information theory," created this simple term to describe the most fundamental unit of digital information.
While a single bit doesn't hold much information on its own, computers group them together to represent more complex data.
Data is most commonly measured in bytes.
A byte is a sequence of 8 bits. This grouping allows for 256 (28) different combinations of 0s and 1s, which is enough to represent all the characters on your keyboard, including letters, numbers, and symbols.
From the byte, we get larger units of data storage:
You've likely seen internet speeds advertised in megabits per second (Mbps). This measures how many millions of bits can be transferred per second.
However, file sizes are measured in megabytes (MB). To understand your actual download speed, you need to convert bits to bytes.
Since there are 8 bits in a byte, you simply divide the Mbps value by 8.
Example: A 100 Mbps internet connection can download 12.5 megabytes (MB) of data per second (100 Mbps / 8 = 12.5 MBps).