The speed of information depends on the bandwidth of the channel. Bandwidth is the property of a medium or channel of communication. Sound waves in air, light waves in optical fiber or glass, electrical waves in a cable do possess certain bandwidth limitations arising from their medium of information travel. It turns out that light waves in glass have much higher bandwidth when compared to electrical waves in a metallic cable.
We can think of light as a stream of massless particles called photons. Since these particles are massless, we can modulate them much faster than massive particles.
Electrons carry electrical waves in metal. The mass of an electron is tiny but non-zero. Thus, we cannot modulate massive electrons as fast as massless photons.
Thus, light offers a huge bandwidth advantage over electricity. Hence, the internet over an optical fiber can easily have Tb/s or 1012 bits per second speed while the same on a metallic cable is limited to about a Gb/s or 109 bits per second. Thus, optical communication is at least three orders of magnitude faster than its electrical counterpart!
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