In telecommunication

Telecommunication

Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...

, effective data transfer rate is the average number of units of data

Data

The term data refers to qualitative or quantitative attributes of a variable or set of variables. Data are typically the results of measurements and can be the basis of graphs, images, or observations of a set of variables. Data are often viewed as the lowest level of abstraction from which...

, such as bits, characters, blocks, or frames, transferred per unit time

Time

Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....

 from a source and accepted as valid by a sink

Sink (computing)

In computing, a sink or event sink is a class or function designed to receive incoming events from another object or function. This is commonly implemented in C++ as callbacks. Object-oriented languages, such as Java and C#, have built-in support for sinks by allowing events to be fired to...

.

Note: The effective data transfer rate is usually expressed in bits, characters, blocks, or frames per second. The effective data transfer rate may be averaged over a period of seconds, minutes, or hours.