Eli5 How does the teeny tiny ‘actual’ undersea internet cable transport all the information requests from both sides of the Atlantic?

Question

If the huge layers of cables around it are just for protection, how can the large number of requests be transmutted through a cable that thin?

In: 2

Answer 1

The thickness doesn’t matter. Per wire only one signal can exist at a given timepoint, no matter how thick it is.

And there you got your solution: you have to send the signals in very short time intervals. In an optical cable those are just extremely short pulses of laserlight.

The limiting factor for that is “dispersion”. That is how much the signal gets “smeared” over time. That is caused by tiny impurities in the glass fibres, wich randomly make parts of the signal slower so a _| pulse gets stretched into a _/ (so if you transmit too fast they blur into each other)