this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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there's nothing better than optic fiber because nothing can be faster than light
Edit: as comment below says optic fiber isn't actually faster, but still better because it has lower packet loss, is cheaper and not owned by elon musk
This has got a scary amount of up votes, especially considering that this is the 'technology' community.
Radiowaves are also 'light' and infact as many others have mentioned so eloquently, light travelling through air is faster than light travelling through glass. The reasons why fiber is better are - better stability because of lower packet loss and interference, better efficiency because of lower attenuation and losses due to diffusion, reflection, and other processes when traveling in a fiber optic cable, and more bandwidth because we can use more favourable frequencies in optic cables (@[email protected] explains it perfectly in another reply to the parent comment)
Eh, I think it's fine. Fiber is faster (higher bandwidth, lower latency) than light transmission due to the factors you mentioned, so whether it technically transmits slower than light is largely irrelevant.
The speed of light through a medium is what varies, since I have to deal with this at work, and the speed of light through air is technically faster than the speed of light through fiber. But now there is hollow core fiber that makes this difference less.
Between Chicago and New York the latency of the specialized wireless links commercially available is around about 1/2 of standard fiber taking the most direct route. But bandwidth is also only in gigabits/s vs terabits/s you can put over typical fiber backbone.
But both are faster than humans can perceive anyway.
Yes, but transmission loss causes packet retransmission, which adds to perceived latency, and fiber usually doesn't need to travel as far physically as a satellite, so there's less distance to cover.
So yes, the "speed" of light through fiber is technically slower than via air, the data transfer is usually faster.
Transmission loss/attenuation only informs the power needed on the transmission side for the receiver to be able to receive the signal. The wireless networks I am talking about don't really have packet loss (aside from when the link goes down for reasons like hardware failure).
I mention Chicago to New York specifically because in the financial trading world, we use both wireless network paths and fiber paths between the locations and measured/real latency is a very big deal and measured to the nanoseconds.
So what I mention has nothing to do with human perception as fiber and wireless are both faster than most human's perceptions. We also don't have packet loss on either network path.
High speed/ high frequency Wireless is bound by the curvature of the earth and terrain for repeater locations. Even with all of the repeaters, measured latency for these commercially available wireless links are 1/2 the latency of the most direct commercially available fiber path between Chicago and New York.
Fiber has in-line passive amplifiers, which are a fun thing to read about how they work, so transmission loss/attenuation only applies to where the passive amplifiers are.
You are conflating latency (how long it takes bits to go between locations) with bandwidth (how many bits can be sent per second between locations) in your last line.
That's why I put "speed" in quotes. When lay people say "speed," they mean a mix of latency and bandwidth, and lay people are the target for a discussion comparing Starlink and fiber internet.
Point to point wireless can be incredibly "fast" and reliable, at least until a storm interferes or knocks something out of alignment. We used point to point wireless at a previous company for our internet needs, and it worked really well, and I'm guessing more industrial installations are even better.
But your average person will have a much better experience with fiber to the home than fixed wireless. That's the point I think the OP is making.
Again the latency might be not better for fiber. But the difference is small and the other factors are much better so the experience with fiber is a lot more stable .
I do not expect most people to know that non visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum is also similar to visible light. But on technology community on what is a niche enthusiast heavy platform (Lemmy), I expect people to know better to than to upvote something that is blatantly wrong.
It's not blatantly wrong, it's technically wrong but close enough. Fiber is faster than satellite because it uses fiber, not because it uses light. There are a lot of less technical people here, so I think it's close enough.
That's...not really a cogent argument.
Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).
Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum
light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they're just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don't call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.
If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don't use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/
Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that "physics bandwidth" tends to care about fractional bandwidth ("delta frequency divided by frequency"), whereas "information bandwidth" cares about absolute bandwidth ("delta frequency"), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz
so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.
Microwave point-to-point radios are fastest because they travel through air, but more importantly, are typically the shortest path possible by line-of-sight.
Being 66.7% of speed of light doesn't matter terribly when you consider that the cable path is shorter by more than 66.7% of path taken by satelite link.
I'm a complete laymen when it comes to this, but this sounds like it would pertain to latency rather than bandwidth. I expect that fiber would have a much higher data capacity than satellite.
Yep, you're right
I was just responding to parent's comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)
Light in glass is actually surprisingly slow
After some distance, starlink would have better latency, as while the signal needs to go through a bunch of km of slow atmosphere, it would make up for that by having a big part of the signal go through vacuum between satellites
But latency isn't everything
Fiber (when properly installed) is very stable. Satellite and mobile is always at least a little bit flaky
St*rlink orbits at 500 km so you would need to be like 1800 km by land away from your destination to have a better latency. At that point your latency will be terrible anyway
Hard to calculate exactly.
Latency is lower through the atmosphere than in glass (I thought that air was worse, but turns out it's not. Makes sense. Glass is solid after all)
So it could be even closer than that. But there's also the problem of the SL base station having to do the last bit of the route through fiber to the destination again. Do it also depends on where the base station is located in regards to the destination
Starlink can be more direct as well. The further fiber goes the less direct it is. By the time we're talking between continents that builds up a lot.
I've heard starlink is faster than fiber by a few nanoseconds and big finance really wants that for their high-speed trading
most of its signals move though space, compared to the glass in fiber so it sorta makes sense
Line of site is a thing......
It depends on the distance, but yes. Those laser interlinks are fast.
Its not, light is the fastest AND isnt as interuptuble and lag induced as satalite. A wired connection will ALWAYS have lesslatency to a sat link.
The problem with fiber is it isn't direct, and the satellites do use lasers (light!) to travel longer distances. The longer the distance the bigger edge satellite internet gets.
light in a vacuum is fastest
light in glass is slower than that
actually think about this before you reply