A communication is byte oriented or character oriented when the transmitted information is grouped into bytes.

The latter term becomes deprecated, since the notion of character has been changed. An ASCII character is indeed equivalent to byte in terms of the amount of information. With the internationalization of computer software, wide characters became necessary, to handle texts in different languages. In particular, Unicode characters use 32 bits, i.e., 4 bytes.

Byte oriented transmission makes use of byte oriented protocols, that may involve transmission of additional bits as terminators, means of error recovery, etc.

The term byte oriented is often placed in an opposition to bit oriented, a distinction resembling that of binary and text files.