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

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

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First off you take all the 1’s and 0’s and bundle them up, then you do some maths so you can tell if any go missing or get mangled in transit and tag the answer to that on the end of the bundle, then you convert all those 1’s and 0’s into flashes of light REALLY fast, then you run them through a prism so you can send lots of different colours of light down the same cable at the same time.

At the other end you do the reverse – split the colours out, un-bundle the package, check that you get the right answer and if not ask the other end to send it again.

In the middle you can add signal boosters that knock all the blurry edges off the flashes and boost them back up to full power.

One under-sea cable can have 100’s of individual fibres so multiply many colours by many fibres and the fact you can send flashes REALLY fast and there you go.

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