Wire speed

Wire speed or Wirespeed refers to the theoretical maximum data transmission rate of a cable or other transmission medium. The cable speed depends on the physical and electronic properties of the cable, combined with the lowest transmission rate of the connection protocol.

Wirespeed also describes any hardware or function that processes data without reducing the overall transmission rate. This value is often used in connection with built-in functions in microchips that work with wirespeed, especially when these are compared with software implementations. Switches , routers, and similar devices are sometimes referred to as wire-speed devices.

Cable speed is seldom reached for connections between computers because the processor is limited, there is hard disk overhead for writing and reading, or there is competition for resources.

Nevertheless, it is a sensible concept to estimate the theoretically best throughput, although the maximum is actually far from being reached.