Baud Rate

A communications term.

The 'Baud Rate' is the number of symbols transmitted per second. A 'symbol' is one chunk of information.

Note that 'baud rate' is not the same as bit-rate. One symbol (a chunk of information) can be carried by many bits. For example a 1000 Megabit Ethernet channels carries 1000 million bits per second, but only 125 million baud per second. This is because each symbol uses 8 bits.

Engineers use more than one bit per symbol because it helps detect errors.

2020-10