t for more costly, high-priority service can obtain higher speeds than customers with lower-priority service during traffic spikes. Bytes versus Bits: Measuring Capacity and Speed Federal and state requirements mandating retention of e-mail, financial, and other documents as well as corporations retaining all of their files rather than filtering out just what is needed have resulted in computer data storage in the petabytes range. A petabyte equals 1,000,000,000,000,000 characters or 1,000 gigabytes. People often use the terms "bits," and "bytes" interchangeably. Their meanings, however, differ significantly. Bits per second (bps) refers to the actual number of bits sent in a given time from point A to point B, or the number of bits transmit- ted each second. It is also represented as millions of bits per second (Mbps), gigabits per second (Gbps), and terabits per second (Tbps). Simply put, it is the number of bits that can be transmitted in one second. Continued Computing and Enabling Technologies Bps (with a capital "B") stands for bytes per second by convention. Speeds are represented by the bps acronym. Here are some examples: Gigabit Ethernet, used in carrier and enterprise networks, can carry data at speeds of one gigabit per second (1Gbps) to 100 gigabits per second (100Gbps). Terabit speed routers deployed on the Internet are capable of transmit- ting at a rate of 1,000 gigabits or 1 terabit; 10 terabits per second = 10,000,000,000,000 bps. Bits organized into groups of 8 bits are bytes. Each byte can be a letter character, punctuation, or a space. Computer hard-drive capacity is measured in bytes, but speeds on digital lines are measured in bits transmitted per second. Bytes stored on computer drives and large servers are stored in digital form. To summarize, a byte is a character made up of 8 bits. A bit is an on or off elec- trical or light pulse. WIDE AREA NETWORK ACCELERATION AND OPTIMIZATION Lower-cost Wide Area Network (WAN) services and data lines have made it affordable for midsize and some small