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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates
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To: RoseCampion who wrote (25246)5/24/2000 11:12:00 AM
From: rushnomore  Read Replies (2) of 54805
 
OT -- photons vs. electrons

The reason is simple -- photons travel through glass much more quickly than electrons travel through wire.

Rose wrote: ....electrons themselves pass through a copper wire very, very slowly....It's the electromagnetic wave that travels through the copper wire at near light-speed or a goodly fraction of same.....So the author is technically correct about the relative speed of photons vs. electrons, but of course (as everyone else has already pointed out) that's completely irrelevant to the bandwidth issue at hand. I believe that optical fiber comes out far on top because light is at a much higher frequency (=higher Shannon limit); you also can do fun stuff like 192-channel DWDM which would be impossible in a copper wire because fiber's interference and attenuation characteristics permit such things while copper doesn't.

Someone with a real engineering background can probably explain this more accurately.

Rose et al:
I have a real engineering background, and you have described it pretty accurately. Yes, electrons do travel very slowly, and yes, the data (or any electronic signal) travels at some large fraction of the speed of light because the signal is carried by the electromagnetic wave. Light is just another kind of electromagnetic wave (light can alternatively be represented by photons), but the difference is that the optical fiber has the capability of carrying a much wider bandwidth than copper wires do. With this bandwidth many different light beams, each of a different color (frequency, or wavelength) can travel over the same fiber. And each light beam can be modulated at a very high bit rate.
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