How do cable lines on telephone poles transmit and receive data along thousands of houses and not get interference?

Question

How do cable lines on telephone poles transmit and receive data along thousands of houses and not get interference?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

We are talking about billions of possible frequencies. Think of it like this, you have a bag of sand. Only one size grain is meant for you though. So you have two sifters, one that lets through all grains all grains smaller than yours, one that holds back all grains bigger.

So you pour the sand through the first sifter, and boom, no grains smaller than yours get through. You pour the leftover contents through the other sifter, and only the ones meant for you get through. Boom. Out of billions of grains, you get the ones meant for you, no matter how mixed they were before.

Edit, since I apparently wasn’t clear enough. The information is split into different frequencies. Each frequency being the grains of sand. They can be mixed together, yet still singled back out through bandpass filtration, aka, the holes in the sieve here.