Fiber optic cable has a bandwidth of about how many GHz?

Answer 1

Bandwidth is measured in bits eg Gigabits (Gb) Megabits Mb not to be confused with Gigabytes as in "how many Gigabytes of RAM/Hard Drive space does your computer have?"

When abbreviated gigabits is Gb (with the "b" as a lower case) vs. Gigabytes which uses a capital B in the abbreviation

The difference is important because there are 8 bits in a byte so mixing the two up tends to throw off one's calculations.

Anyways back to the topic on hand, there are MANY different types of fiber data cables with various bandwidths, such as ones you would find in a datacenter, some server setups, or connecting a number of switches in a large network.

4Gbit/sec & 8Gbit/sec are fairly commonplace though 10Gbit/sec is becoming more and more widely used.

there are also OC connections (from OC 1 or 2 or 12 all the way to OC -768 which is upwards of 38 Gbit/sec and generally only used as the backbone of large enterprise networks)

Then there are the cables that run under the ocean and connect continents (theres over 176 of these)

Now these cables have many, many individual fiber optic strands in them and have bandwidth of hundreds or thousands of Gbits/seccond

I also have some older 24 and 36 port switches kicking around that have 1 Gigabit fiber connectors, however that is the standard these days for desktop and laptop computers (for wired, not wifi) although thats using the copper wire Cat-5 or Cat-5 cables which are much cheaper so the 1Gbit fiber is obselete unless you're trying to use it for long distances, as fiber optic cables -transmitter depending- have much less attenuation (signal degridation) than copper and transmitter depending can go through cables that are several kilometers long without needing a repeater.

Hope this helps