I know that it takes <0.1 seconds for light to go across the ocean and back, but how quickly are the messages sent? How can long documents and videos be compressed into flashes that last ridiculously short? How many flashes per millisecond happen?
In: Engineering
The upper theoretical limit is about 1 petabit per second, which implies a pulse rate of 15 petaHz or a pulse length of 1 femtosecond. REALLY fast.
It means the length of the pulse is incredibly small, about 0.000008 inches.
In practice you don’t go that fast, but it’s still really fast. Real cables going tens of Gb per second are perfectly normal.
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