Bandwidth: kbps to GB/month conversion

admin — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:23:24 +0000

How you know how much will pay for the bandwidth used in a server inside the Cloud?
Often cloud services give you a calculator but this is based on Giga Bytes per Month of traffic but normally you measure bandwidth throughput on your server in kbps.

Install some graphical tool for collection of bandwidth data in your server (like Cacti, Munin, Zabbix ecc.)
After some time (the longer the better, for statistical purposes) take the average bandwidth consumption, often given in kbps (Kilo Bytes per Second)
Convert kbps in GB per month and this where this post become useful :)

So to convert kbps in GB/Month we can simply obtain a constant from the following logic steps:

1kbps = 1KiloBitperSecond
1KiloBitperHour = 3600 kbps
1KiloBitperDay = 3600*24 kbps
1KiloBitperMonth = 3600*24*30 kbps
1Bit = 1Byte/8
1Kilo = 1Giga/1.000.000

So the constant will be 3600*24*30/8/1.000.000 = 0.324

For example 150kbps of bandwidth will generate 150*0.324=48.6GB per month traffic

or conversely, for example 80GB per Month will be 80/0.324 = 246.91 kbps on average throughtput

Therefore the constant is 0.324 and as a rule of thumb you can remember 0.3 or one/third ;)

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Bandwidth: kbps to GB/month conversion