I always wonder how a server like google server receive thousands of request from people at once! I understand the signals are passed through fibernet cable, but won’t those signals collide ? Or how can some small wire handle soo many requests at once ? iin my mind a wire can only take one request at a time. I know these happens close to light speed, but still! its very hard to understand.
In: Technology
Every time you combine data streams from multiple wires into one (or vice versa), you need a device to handle that.
For example, your router will combine communications from all your devices into one wire that goes to your ISP (by having your devices essentially take turns using the wire), and your ISP will combine multiple customer’s data into a single wire that goes to the server.
As to how these data streams are combined, there is time division and frequency division. Time division just means the signal take turns being sent – usually a ‘turn’ lasts literally microseconds.
Frequency division is more complex, and works as follows:
1) a signal is encoded by varying the frequency of a wave over time. For example, if 100MHz corresponds to a 0 and 101MHz corresponds to a 1, when we observe 100MHz for 1 microsecond (an arbitrary amount of time I chose), then 101MHz for 2 microseconds, we just received ‘011’.
2) when multiple frequencies are added together, we are actually able to decompose them back to the individual frequencies through a technique called the Fourier transform.
This allows for multiple signals to be sent at the same time through a medium, as long as each signal receives its own unique frequency band to operate in.
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