The remarkable thing about the hair-thin strands of optical fiber that Corning and other companies sell today is that any single strand of glass can carry many different beams of light at the same time, each beam wobbling at its own frequency and using its own method of encoding information. This is the enormous advantage of fiber: Its overall bandwidth potential (how many different signals it can transmit and how fast you can encode or modulate them) is much higher than any other transmission medium. fiber optics certification Unless the transmission medium itself somehow gets in the way, as a deep pothole or a truck might block the road when a car wants to go by, a single fiber-optic cable could carry the entire weight of data on the internet. Image render with a strand of human hair on the left with a shorter piece of an optical fiber to the right of the strand...