Sorry if this seems like a silly question, but in terms of a link between two places, would any one be faster for sending data?
Say there are two buildings a mile apart would any one a fiber optic cable or a link using two microwave dishes be faster?
Just wondering.
It depends on what you mean by faster. If you are talking about time delay, then microwave is faster. Light slows down when travelling through a dense medium like fiber optics.
But usually the important parameter is bandwidth, i.e. how many bits of data you can send every second. In this sense, fiber optics is much “faster” (transmits more data in a given time).
In air the signal will travel at about 3x10[sup]8[/sup] metres per second. In the fiber, the signal will travel more slowly, typically about 2x10[sup]8[/sup] metres per second.
But over a distance of a mile, that means times of 5.3 microseconds for the microwave vs 8 microseconds for the fiber.
Usually microwave transmitters/rec will convert the signal to fiber anyway, this extra conversion step eats some time.
k2dave: Cite? And what’s the propagation delay?
The question is “faster for sending data.” I don’t think the propagation delay would matter, just the data rate of the two methods. And you haven’t specified what the data rate is. If you have an OC-192 fiber between the buildings (10 gbps), this would certainly be faster that anything you can get with microwave. But you probably don’t have OC-192, since that’s expensive and mostly used for long haul communications. You might have instead OC-3, which is 155 Mbps. What you need to do is find out the details of both systems (their data rates), and compare that.