Are the electrons in a metal cable not also traveling with the speed of light?!
Why is there so much more bandwidth possible with fiber wiring?
Is the metal cable more prone to external influences? Is the signal getting worse and disturbing itself when trying to achieve higher frequency / bandwidth?
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One reason is interference. Wires act like antennas and can recieve interference from nearby radio transmitters, sparking wires, motors, current passing through nearby wires, etc. Fiber optics eliminate all that because it is non-conductive.
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Fundamentally, it’s because electricity generates and is affected by magnetic fields while light isn’t. Electrical wires will constantly suffer interference both because of outside forces but also because they generate their own magnetic field. We shield the lines and use signal boosters to clean it up but there’s always some level of noise after a few miles.
Glass fiber doesn’t have this issue. Yes, there’s some loss in power but no loss in clarity. You can boost the signal back up and carry it nearly perfectly for hundreds of miles.
Both copper and fiber use carrier waves to transmit data. With a carrier wave, we modulate (repeatedly change) some property of the wave, whether amplitude, frequency, or phase, in order to represent the data. The amount of data a carrier wave can transmit is dependent on the frequency of the carrier wave. Higher frequencies mean a higher data rate. Fiber can allow carrier waves with much higher frequencies than copper can, 10^14 Hz for fiber vs 10^9 Hz for copper.
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