I've searched all over the net and this forum, and I cannot seem to find exactly what the server/client rate is measured in.  All I can find is equivalence tables showing what rates should be used for what connections.  I'm assuming that it is probably either bps or Bps, but I'd like to know for sure.  Any info or a link to another discussion would be appreciated.

lol spike or somone else would have to answer that one, all i kno if its 2500 u teleport lol 10000 its good

Rate is in bps.  Try doing a search on Q3 bandwidth chart for full table of rates vs connection speeds.

-SuB

From MontyBass' post in the pinned Server Setup Guide :

Maxrate/Player/Bandwidth Requirements

Rate is measured in bytes/second.

Say you wished to set the sv_maxrate to 10000. Multiply that by 8; that would give you the maxrate in bits (80000). Multiply that number by the number of clients you wish to host for; that will give you the required bandwidth. You would like to host for 16 clients? You would need 1,280,000 bits of bandwidth to host for that many clients. It's always a good idea to allow for a little overhead. In this case, a T1 (1.544 Mb) would work nicely, provided that you didn't also run an FTP server on the line.

DSL providers usually guarantee 85% of the advertised bandwidth. Cable providers often don't provide any guarantee, especially with upstream. Leased lines such as T1 should be guaranteed the full bandwidth.

In my case, I only have 144k of upstream. Without overhead, I could set the maxrate to 3000 and host for 6, but I allow for the overhead and set the maxrate to 2500 instead, which would require 120,000 bits of bandwidth. I've never had anyone complain that the maxrate was set too low, but if I had more bandwidth, I would set it higher.

Hehe, nothing like two responses and two different answers ;)

Thanks for the info though guys, I think I've figured out what I needed to know.