I understand that there are 1’s and 0’s (on/off) in binary code to transmit data, but does the light inside the fiber optic flash billions of times per second to simulate the 1’s and 0’s? Im also curious if copper ethernet cables work in a similar way to transmit data.
In: Technology
Basically, yes. You flash the light, and that’s information.
What’s important about fiber optics is that they can have a lot of signals going through them at the same time, without mucking each other up. The first way is to put in multiple colors of light, with a splitter for each color at the end. More advanced than that, you can control which direction the light is waving, and get a bunch more signals *for each color.*
So while each individual signal is relatively easy to generate, the combination of all of them is a LOT of data. A new record was set earlier this year of a **peta**bit per second, through one piece of glass.
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