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The highest frequency you can practically send long distances over coax is around 1-2GHz. When I had a cable modem the highest I saw was 900MHz. Therefore, regardless of what encoding scheme you use you will never get more then a couple GHz of bandwidth.

Visible light starts at 400THz so right off the bat you get 10k times more more headroom before physics becomes the limiting factor.

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I was thinking somehow that the response / recovery time of the silicon detectors to react to the laser pulses would be a limiting factor, is that at all valid?

Like, you cannot blink faster than <x> nanoseconds and get a CCD(?) to see it properly. (I'm sure it's not like a CCD with readout, etc. but whatever mechanism is the correct one, is there some natural minimum read time?)

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