Subject was long enough for question
To my knowledge, the faster fiber I've seen that isn't in a lab is 100gb. That'd be for backhual type infrastructure. I know there is some gigabit copper, but that's only short distance. Such as fiber to the main, and copper for the last mile. I may be ignorant to anything faster, but that's the fastest I know of currently being used outside of a lab testing somewhere.
Single fibre can do 100Gbit/s.
Copper can do about 700Mbit/s.
Fastest single medium transfer ever was 43Tbit/s using one laser.
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@tysono are you wanting just in general or for actual internet infrastructure? This makes a big difference
Can you provide sources for your measurements? As he didn't say internet and instaed just asked for optic fibre and copper, technically people can get 10gigabit copper, although expensive.
Fastest single fiber speed: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/187258-43tbps-over-a-single-fiber-worlds-fastest-network-would-let-you-download-a-movie-in-0-2-milliseconds
Original release on fastest single fibre optic data transfer:
I do not have a 200,000,000 lab to test something. DONE. So we need to go with what we got. Network modules are rated 1Mbit/s, 10Mbit/s, 100Mbit/s, 1Gbit/s, 10Gbit/s, 100Gbit/s
So the fastest one can achive at home is 100Gbit/s using a single link.
You could also glue IDE cables to another until you get a square block of conducters, solder connectors at each end and use it to transfer data. If you do that, send me a picture of that grey worm of doom!
I said not in a lab. Yeah there is fiber that has done 43Tbit/s in a lab, but there is no connection in deployment that is faster than 100gb/s.
internet
People have answered most, an interesting one on actual deployed tech is last mile phone line copper, 500Mbit/s is currently being rolled out.
the fastest speed both fiber and copper can do now as far as internet is 400gigabits. terabit should be available in a few years. currently the limiting factor is more about Ethernet controller availability then the cable it self.
Copper can be fast at short distances. My sister-in-law had a business near the last mile node and the DSL speeds were faster than they should have been. It's still no fibre though.
Copper is good for high speeds over relatively short distances. But with fiber, to get faster speeds all you have to do is change the technology on either end of the line. Right now, there are lines capable of 100Gbit.
There's a study that was done that proposes that we could send two bits per photon. So yeah, theoretically? The physical limit of fiber optics is two bits per photon. Which is crazy.
The problem isnt the copper or fiber you can always have multiple strands going at once its the end points that are the slow down. Right now I am currently working on something called silicon phonics. Basically we want to see if you can some how use silicon to act as an interface.
299792458 meters per second
Not really. You'd be surprised how slow it is.
Ya'll are also missing the point a bit, though you can do 10Gbps over copper you can easily do 280Gbps + over a single strand of dark fiber in a metro loop. CWDM and DWDM are technologies that let you use multiple spectrum of light on the same fiber. You use physical mux/demux blocks to join and split the light. Also due to the smaller diameter of conductor per unit length it lets you have much more bandwidth in the conduit. With gear like the Arista 7512 large number of 10gbps and 100Gbps connections are able to switch 45Tbps of bandwidth.
Again tho cable has never been the problem. We have had near light speed communication since the 1800s with the telegram. Copper and fiber aren't really that new. In fact most of today's tech really isn't that amazing. Telegram was amazing. The train was amazing. I mean the Internet is just mass telegrams and trains still move mountains. There really isn't a whole lot that we haven't had. The problem is the end points. They just aren't that fast yet.