I can't speak to whether or not you can get the same bandwidth with wire/electricity as you can with lasers/fiber but there's also a couple practical things here:
Electrical signal propagation takes a lot more energy than light propagation. (physics folks can explain why way better than I can). That's why you can send 10GBE about 100M over twisted pair, but many KMs over fiber from the same SFP+ port (aka using the same power draw).
Long wires make good antennas, so you have a lot more sources of interference on the long wires meaning the signal gets lost in the noise easier if there happens to be lightning, power wires, big motors, etc near-by. (see also energy needs). Dealing with this uses some combination of complex switching schemes in multiple wires, shielding and signal processing. More complex than "on and off" from your laser. (Other things like capacitance and inductance in wires adds to complexity here too).
Point of all that being: I think part of the reason you get the impression that photons carry more data than electrons is that more effort is put into photons carrying lots of data fast - purely from a practical "it's easier to engineer" standpoint. Why worry about all the hard practical electrical engineering when we can just get good at turning lasers on and off really fast, and have good optical sensors where the laser is pointing?
By the way, if you know, what are the kinds of detectors at the other end of the laser pulse that receive the signal? Are they like the pixels of a CCD but without the need for periodic / time-bound readout? They just are like silicon photocells that can react at the femto(?)-second speed and turn it into pulses translated into electrons?
Electrical signal propagation takes a lot more energy than light propagation. (physics folks can explain why way better than I can). That's why you can send 10GBE about 100M over twisted pair, but many KMs over fiber from the same SFP+ port (aka using the same power draw).
Long wires make good antennas, so you have a lot more sources of interference on the long wires meaning the signal gets lost in the noise easier if there happens to be lightning, power wires, big motors, etc near-by. (see also energy needs). Dealing with this uses some combination of complex switching schemes in multiple wires, shielding and signal processing. More complex than "on and off" from your laser. (Other things like capacitance and inductance in wires adds to complexity here too).
Point of all that being: I think part of the reason you get the impression that photons carry more data than electrons is that more effort is put into photons carrying lots of data fast - purely from a practical "it's easier to engineer" standpoint. Why worry about all the hard practical electrical engineering when we can just get good at turning lasers on and off really fast, and have good optical sensors where the laser is pointing?