ElI5 How do telephone wires carry multiple messages at once? How do messages not interrupt each other?
In: Technology
The analogy is to consider listening to music say from a band or orchestra. All the instruments send their sound messages through the air. It is still possible for us to discern between a drum and a guitar and a piano – and very likely hear the different notes they are playing even though they sound at the same time. In a similar way, multiple messages can be encoded on a single wire and with the proper filtering at the receiving end, these messages can be “heard” separately.
This happens all the time with analog radio (for example). All the radio signals from all the stations are present everywhere and the radio is designed so that you can “tune in” to a particular station and ignore the others.
With digital, there is even more ability to interleave messages and use digital processing to de-interleave the received digital data into various streams which is why one internet cable can simultaneously support multiple devices browsing, streaming, gaming etc.
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