Eli5: how can a single data cable supply so many homes with different data at once, like for internet connections? Isn’t everything basically just 0s and 1s? If that’s the case how is it being organized and sent to the right place?

Question

Thanks for the answers! My biggest takeaway is about how bits work using different frequencies, and how fiber optics can use different colors to help organize data

In: Technology

Answer 1

other great answers here. In addition to everything they said there’s a simpler mechanism at work as well.

It works the same way your mail truck can carry your mail as well as the mail for everyone else on your street. Yeah, it’s all 1’s and 0’s, but some of those are addresses and equipment is reading them and using them to make decisions about what goes where.

in different scenarios this is either operates like a “switch” or a “bus”/”hub”.

“Switched” here would mean a device receiving a bunch of traffic, and forwarding each packet exactly once, and only to exactly where it needs to go. Efficiently sorting one stream into many smaller streams.

A “hub” or “bus” topology is where all the paths can see all the data, and each listening device is just configured to listen for its own address, seeing but ignoring any traffic that belongs to anyone else.