Bit Error Rate Calculator

Work out bit error rate instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.

About Bit Error Rate Calculator

Bit error rate is errors divided by bits transmitted, and it converts to frame loss through 1 - (1 - BER)^(frame bits): a BER of 10^-12 corrupts about one frame in 83 million at 1500 bytes. Verifying a low BER takes a long time — at 10 Gbps, confirming 10^-12 with reasonable confidence needs several minutes of error-free transmission.

Formula

BER and frame loss

BER = bit errors / bits sent; frame error rate = 1 - (1 - BER)^(frame bytes x 8); test time for k errors = k / (BER x line rate)

Worked example

With the default values below, Bit Error Rate Calculator returns Bit error rate of 3.000e-12. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Bits transmittedminimum 1: 1,000,000,000,000
Bit errors observedminimum 0: 3
Link rateminimum 0.001 Gbps: 10 Gbps
Frame size for frame-loss conversionaccepts 64–9,216 bytes: 1,500 bytes

Results

Bit error rate: 3.000e-12
Resulting frame error rate: 0.000004%
Average seconds between bit errors: 33.3 s
Test duration to observe three errors: 100 s

Step by step

1Values used
2BER and frame loss
3Bit error rate= 3.000e-12
4Resulting frame error rate= 0.000004
5Average seconds between bit errors= 33.3 s
6Test duration to observe three errors= 100 s

Assumptions and limits

The result is derived only from the 4 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
Figures are rounded for display to 6 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What BER does Ethernet specify?

10^-12 or better for most copper and optical variants. Some long-reach optical standards specify 10^-13 before forward error correction.

Why does forward error correction help?

It corrects a bounded number of errors per block, converting a raw BER of around 10^-5 into a post-FEC rate well below 10^-15, which is how 400G optics work at all.