I understand the physics behind how the cables themselves work in transmitting light. What I don’t quite understand is how it’s possible to convert millions of messages, emails, etc every second and transmit them back and forth using only a few of those transoceanic cables. Basically, how do they funnel down all that data into several cables?
In: Engineering
Imagine the cable fiber communication works similar to how Morse code lines work. They send data via lights on and lights off (0 and 1) instead of the regular _ . from Morse code.
Specialized machines (routers, but waaaay more powerful than the one you have at home) code and decode this 0-1 into usable date.
Remember that light travels incredibly quickly (about 0.01 seconds in a transatlantic fiber cable, example Yellow/AC-2), so the 0 and 1 make it from one side to the other really fast.
Now imagine that on top of this you can use red for one line of messaging and blue for another, and yellow, green, etc. So that you can use several lines of communication for each fiber.
And also note that Everytime they make a transatlantic cable they use a LOT of single fibers because if you are on the bottom of the ocean puting one fiber or 100 is almost the same cost.
That’s how you get data speeds of up to 160 terabits per second across the ocean (see MAREA transatlantic communication cable)
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