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

Ons and offs are actually pretty rudimentary. Now advanced encoding schemes exist that allow more bits per symbol.

Routers commonly use a scheme with 128 possible amplitude and phase shift values, allowing for 8 bits per symbol instead of 1 at a time.

There’s also fiber optic, which is intently faster and can interlace different colors simultaneously to increase bandwidth.

Then all of the data is tagged with where it needs to go.