Fiber can deliver a single 800gigabit connection over a single strand of fiber, and if you have multiple connections you want to run over a single fiber you can use different colors for each connection and run theoretically up to 2048 different connections over a single strand of fiber. (Currently most commercial deployments top out at about 160 connections per fiber strand)

Since these various connections are all made up of specific wavelengths of light, they can be “switched” by simply running the light through a prism, meaning a ton of your network infrastructure is entirely passive and doesn’t require any electricity to operate, reducing downtime, complexity and cost

One downside of fiber is you generally need one connection for uplink and one for downlink, but there are bidi transceivers which either use 2 wavelengths, one for uplink and one for down, or will time share uplink and downlink. Or since each of these individual strands of fiber are incredibly small, literally about 7 microns across, you can pack hundred or even thousands of strands of fiber into one cable.

Fiber also operates at literally the speed of light, meaning the connection to the Internet is incredibly low latency. Fiber also doesn’t rust like coax or telephone wires. As long as the actual fiber isn’t broken you can keep replacing the transceivers at each end indefinitely to upgrade the connection

I will agree though, it is super cool that multi-gig connections ultimately are possible over existing coax networks. I didn’t think I’d see it but here we are!

Edit: I was a little out of date. Currently up to 1.6Terrabit over fiber

It is true. What’s your upload speed? 😁

Fiber connections are synchronous. Meaning that the download speed is the same as the upload speed.

A gigabit fiber connection gives you 1 gigabit down and 1 gigabit up. A “gigabit” cable connection gives you 1.something gigabit down (it allows for spikes… Usually) and like 20-50 megabits upload.

Fiber ISPs may still limit your upload speeds but that’s not a limitation of the technology. It’s them oversubscribing their (back end) bandwidth.

Cable Internet really can’t give you gigabit uploads without dedicating half the available channels for that purpose and that would actually interfere with their ability to oversubscribe lines. It’s complicated… But just know that the DOCSIS standards are basically hacks (that will soon run into physical limitations that prevent them from providing more than 10gbs down) in comparison to fiber.

The DOCSIS 4.0 standard claims to be able to handle 10gbs down and 6gbs up realistically that’s never going to happen. Instead, cable companies will use it to give people 5gbs connections with 100 megabit uploads because they’re bastards.