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.
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.