Fiber optic cables don't carry electricity at all. They just flash light and let physics handle the rest

[ElPresidente]

Traditional cable and DSL internet connections send data as electrical signals traveling through copper wire, the same basic principle behind telegraph lines from over a century ago, just refined and sped up considerably. Fiber optic internet works completely differently, encoding data as pulses of light and sending them through incredibly thin strands of glass or plastic, each one roughly the width of a human hair, bundled together by the dozens or hundreds inside a single protective cable

At the source, a laser or LED generates rapid pulses of light representing data in binary form, the same underlying 0s and 1s used throughout computing, and those pulses travel down the fiber strand at around two thirds the actual speed of light, dramatically faster and more efficient than electrons moving through copper wire ever could be. When the light reaches its destination, a piece of equipment called an optical network terminal converts it back into an electrical signal your router and devices can actually understand and use

Because it uses light rather than electricity, fiber is also completely immune to electromagnetic interference from nearby power lines, storms or other electrical equipment, something that can degrade a traditional copper connection's signal quality. It also suffers far less signal loss over long distances, which is why fiber has become the backbone connecting the internet's major data centers globally, even in places where the final stretch into individual homes still sometimes runs over older copper infrastructure, creating a real world bottleneck where the fastest part of the journey ends at a neighborhood box before slowing back down over that last, older copper connection

Fiber Optics And The Speed Of Lightjumpfiber.com

[Pat]

Two thirds the actual speed of light for the data transmission itself is such a wild, concrete number, that alone explains the entire efficiency and speed advantage in one sentence