What is "wire speed"

n. 1 The speed at which a wire moves through a machine 2 (context computing English) The (maximum) rate at which data can flow through a cable

In computer networking, wire speed or wirespeed refers to the hypothetical peak physical layer net bitrate (useful information rate) of a cable (consisting of fiber-optical wires or copper wires) combined with a certain digital communication device, interface, or port. For example, the wire speed of Fast Ethernet is 100 Mbit/s also known as the peak bitrate, connection speed, useful bit rate, information rate, or digital bandwidth capacity. The wire speed is the data transfer rate that a telecommunications standard provides at a reference point between the physical layer and the datalink layer.