I am not sure what you are asking, but Electricity travels at the speed of light, or so I'm told. 
As to the bandwidth, since the carrier signal of the fiber optic(light has a much smaller 
wavelength, it can thus carry more data and because it is light, it is unaffected by crosstalk and 
other forms of RF interference. Thus you have Fiber that can allow more data to flow simultaneously 
with much less retransmissions of data allowing for greater or Bandwidth ("Speed"). Fiber will out 
perform Copper, period.

Does that answer your question?

Thanks,

Jeff

 ----------
From: kclug@kclug.org
To: kclug@kclug.org
Cc: jeff.mccright@southernunionco.com
Subject: kclug - bandwidth question

i had a question come up in my mind recently and was
curious about the answer..my question is this...

if you took a piece of fiber optic and a piece of copper (same length)
and figured the speed of trasmission based on the resistance
of the gauge of wire and speed of light, then put it into a ratio...
for an example, we'll say that the speed of light
(for the fiber optic) was twice as fast as the
electricity flowing over the piece of copper, in this example
we would have a ratio of 1:2
so..if we setup a piece of fiber, and broke down
all the packets (A and B) transmitted into two smaller units
(A1, A2, B1, and B2) and then transmitted them alternating
between packets A and packet B. (sending A1, then B1, A2, B2)
which would essentially increase latency for each user, but
at the same time, allow two users to transmit at the same time.
appearing to run at the copper speed for both (2:1)
essentially halfing the speed of fiber and doubling the bandwidth...
in theory...would the overall network load be better (if the
network segment were supporting a large user base) or would
the result be a complicated network that would run at the same
speed as the original?  note: im only speaking in theory, not
practical..

Evan Hoff
evanh23@usa.net

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