alt Hacker NewsIn case anyone else is curious, since this is something I was always confused about until I looked it up just now:
"Baud rate" refers to the symbol rate, that is the number of pulses of the analog signal per second. A signal that has two voltage states can convey two bits of information per symbol.
"Bit rate" refers to the amount of digital data conveyed. If there are two states per symbol, then the baud rate and bit rate are equivalent. 56K modems used 7 bits per symbol, so the bit rate was 7x the baud rate.
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fkarg • today at 3:53 AM
Yes, except that in modern infra i.e. WiFi 6 is 1024-QAM, which is to say there are 1024 states per symbol, so you can transfer up to 10bits per symbol.
Not sure about your last point but in serial comms there are start and stop bits and sometimes parity. We generally used 8 data bits with no parity so in effect there are 10 bits per character including the stop and start bits. That pretty much matched up with file transfer speeds achieved using one of the good protocols that used sliding windows to remove latency. To calculate expected speed just divide baud by 10 to covert from bits per second to characters per second then there is a little efficiency loss due to protocol overhead. This is direct without modems once you introduce those the speed could be variable.