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

In a purely digital system you can still take turns, for example if the cable can handle 10GBit or 10 billion bits per second, and you have 10 computers all trying to download different movies at the same time, if you have a machine to organize them and make them take turns, they can each get 1Gbit.

Other kinds of cables send analog, in which case you can share in time or also in frequency. Like with radio waves an analog signal can be split into frequency channels, like 100MHz, 200MHz, 300MHz, and so on.