how do undersea cables transfer data from and to millions of people simultaneously?

Question

I understand it’s just signals and 1s and 0s but don’t the signals overlap in the undersea cables?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

The data is sent (mostly) sequentially. So all the data has to get into a line of 1’s and 0’s, which get sent across the ocean. Once the data arrives on the other side, it gets split up and sent to the various people that are supposed to receive it.

The undersea cables are *really* fast and can send multiple billions of 1’s and 0’s every second and they contain multiple cables (it’s not just one big cable, it’s a bundle of hundreds of cables).

In addition, you can use different colors of light. So you’d have a red laser firing into the fiber optic cable, but also a blue and a green laser. This lets you send multiple streams of 1’s and 0’s simultaneously since different colors of light don’t really interfere with each other. At the receiver end, they have a prism which splits the light into separate streams, one for each color, and then each stream of 1’s and 0’s gets split up and sent to the recipients.