How do cable lines on telephone poles transmit and receive data along thousands of houses and not get interference?
In: Engineering
It should also be mentioned that you DO get interference. Lots of it! Most you don’t even notice, because the compounded error correction between the various pieces of hardware and software make it seem like everything is flowing smoothly.
In analog voice communications particularly, the required quality of the physical cabling (in some cases, tin or even lead) was incredibly tolerant. Many of us remember background humming, a distant-sounding busy signal, or just crackly noise during long-distance calls. Our brains did all the error correction, or we just asked the person on the other end to repeat it.
When we started using phone lines for digital communications, trying to push more than about 10Kb on the wire was unreliable. That’s when higher speeds were only realized by improving error correction. Since that time, vastly improved media (twisted copper and fiber optic are the most common now) have helped a lot, but transmission and receive errors are always present, even in communications between a processor and a hard drive.
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