How do cable lines on telephone poles transmit and receive data along thousands of houses and not get interference?
In: Engineering
The interference part of your question.
Edit: Actually a different side of it to consider. The other answers already cover the signals interfering with each other.
There is a lot of interference.
Cracks in cable, bad connectors, faulty hardware and other issues can all lead to signal egress and ingress that can lead to interference with external RF signals from leakage and internal interference from outside sources getting in. These issues increase the amount of signal noise in the system, which essentially makes the signal dirty by reducing the amount of signal above the noise floor (SNR). It is maintained by technicians in the field and an office crew that monitors the plant for those and other issues. The long range work is done almost entirely on fiber-optic cable, but that still requires a lot of work. Fiber splicing is hard work that requires a clean room to prevent dust and other debris from getting inside of the splice and blocking or (even slightly) redirecting the light.
With a coax network, every piece of cable, connector, splitter, directional coupler, amplifier, mini-bridger, and literally any other piece of hardware can cause interference. Even electrical issues in homes can cause problems. I can’t tell you how many intermittent area outages I’ve seen that were caused by people using old electronics that were causing interference. Everything has to be perfect, because there is just so much on these networks.
Basically, it’s done with a lot of work. A lot.
The other answers regarding multiplexing and the like should explain the parts that I would have to Google.
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