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: arstechnica.com/…/private-microwave-networks-fina…
Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about relative bandwidth (“frequency divided by delta 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 relative bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.
Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de 17 hours ago
This has got a scary amount for 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 and better efficiency because there fewer losses due to diffusion, reflection and other processes when traveling in a fiber optic cable.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
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.
JollyGreen_sasquatch@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
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.
Sentau@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
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.