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

The answer is multiplexing.

[There are many ways to do it.](https://www.elprocus.com/what-is-multiplexing-types-and-their-applications/)

In really simple terms, you can put multiple individual ‘data streams’ into the same signal by various means. You can give each data stream its own frequency or its own time slice on the channel etc and then reassemble them back into the individual streams on the receiving end.

A really simple eli5 example of multiplexing over fiber would be to give a different colour laser to each stream and shoot them down the fiber. The receiver could then use colour filters to single out the individual colours again to recover each stream.