I understand it’s just signals and 1s and 0s but don’t the signals overlap in the undersea cables?
In: Engineering
They don’t *collide* because we divide them in send/receive pairs. The simple way is to dedicate one strand to send and one to receive, which is opposed on the other side. That way you are always listening on one strand and always sending on the other. At that point, it is just a matter of the data waiting its turn to be sent or listened to. We typically don’t dedicate an entire stand to this, we break the stand into wavelengths, sometimes you might hear an engineer say “we are sending on blue and taking on red” or something, they are literally talking about the part of the spectrum correlated to the colors we see.
That is the physical side, for routers on each side, they are dumb and fast. All they do is broker data packets, and it is done fast enough that a VOIP (telephone call over the internet) between France and the USA will work without very much issue.
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