High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In computer science, a byte stream is a bit stream, in which data bits are grouped into units, called bytes. In computer networking the term octet stream is sometimes used to refer to the same thing; it emphasizes the use of bytes having the length of 8 bits, known as octets. The size of a byte was not standard when the term was introduced, whereas on most modern computers byte is a synonym of octet. Formally, a byte stream is a certain abstraction, a communication channel down which one entity can send a sequence of bytes to the entity on the other end.