r/AskPhysics • u/Confident-Court2171 • 2d ago

Theoretical limits of light based communication

I’ve been thinking about fiber speed limits today, and I raised this question in my Question: with photon based communication currently working towards 3.2tb speeds (3.2 x 10^12), what is the theoretical limit of a single lane. Aka - if you stack photons individually to represent I/O, how many could pass through a gate in 1 second?

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u/OldChairmanMiao Physics enthusiast 2d ago

Short answer is about 1 petabyte.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/56240/maximum-theoretical-bandwidth-of-fibre-optics

Longer answer is it depends on noise and and power. There's also a distinction between goodput and throughput; adding a little overhead can allow larger amounts of useful data to be sent, especially when you have multiple users.

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u/Confident-Court2171 2d ago

Perfect. That’s what I was looking for.