Talk:Orders of magnitude (bit rate)

Note on article creation

I've gathered the data (and a lot of the source text!) from the two following Wikipedia articles:

• Data rate units#Examples of bit rates (main source)
• List of device bit rates (used the Morse code figure, haven't added anything else)

It appears that Spectral efficiency#Comparison table may also offer some useful examples, if desired.

I've reformatted everything to get closer to the standard format of the orders of magnitude articles. To the best of my knowledge, I haven't introduced any errors as a result of this process, but I'd encourage double-checking things.

Note that one of the entries has a citation-needed tag older than this article. I've left the tag as-is since the text predates the creation of this article.

It would be a good idea to cluster each of the orders of magnitude, like in Orders of magnitude (capacitance), but I'm not yet sure how to do that. I'll attempt it later if someone doesn't beat me to it. -NorsemanII (talk) 17:40, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Update and explanation of rowspan

The article now has clusters for each of the orders of magnitude. This was accomplished by adding | rowspan=X | to the "factor" and "SI prefix" fields of the first row in each joined group, and setting X to equal the number of rows to be included in the joined group. Then, each of the subsequent rows had the "factor" and "SI prefix" fields (the first two fields) removed. Refer to the diff if this explanation isn't clear enough. -NorsemanII (talk) 23:49, 3 August 2013 (UTC)

Raw or usable speeds?

This table does not specify (and mixes) data rates for signalling rates on the cable and net data rates with overhead removed. This should probably at least be indicated somewhat. Since many interfaces are marketed by their signalling rates and thus these are more commonly known than net rates (e.g. SATA I is 1.5 Gbit/s raw and 1.2 Gbit/s net) I think it might be best to just mark "usable rate", "raw rate with 8b10b encoding" and so on. Alternatively, we can make this better than list of device bit rates (which is pretty screwed up) and add a second column for net rates. Zac67 (talk) 20:38, 5 August 2013 (UTC)

There will probably be gaps in a column for usable rates since a lot of the references don't bother to make a distinction between usable rates and net rates (e.g. the petabit cable, and I-ME-WE), and I'm not sure there are any references out there which do make the distinction. That would suggest that the maximum raw rates ought to be used for default sorting, but usable rates would definitely be a worthwhile column to add. -NorsemanII (talk) 19:50, 8 August 2013 (UTC)