There are many types of Reed-Solomon codes, each with different amount of redundancy, they are a special case of BCH codes, a kind of code that approach the Shannon limit (the maximum rate of error-free data that can be transferred over a noisy channel). The bandwidth of a channel (like radio, or optical fiber) is not really limited by the media, but only by the noise it has. Optical fiber have almost zero noise, that's why they are so fast.<p>There are much better codes nowadays that are closer to the Shannon limit, like LDPC, or convolutional codes. But they are usually much more computationally intensive. They are used in space probes where computation time don't matter, but you often have channels with much more noise than signal.<p>I keep a repo of C implementation of several error-correction codes including Reed-Solomon, that can be used as standard unix filters like gzip: <a href="https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/eccchain" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ortegaalfredo/eccchain</a>