I understand it’s just signals and 1s and 0s but don’t the signals overlap in the undersea cables?
In: Engineering
Yes and no. The signals overlap in the sense that they are broken up into chunks, sent separately, and then reassembled, so a bit of my post may be sandwiched between a bit of a YT video and a bit of someone’s email. But the various pieces of hardware that make up the internet know how to break up, track and reassemble all those pieces so we all get what we want (most of the time).
If you’re thinking that the cables are thin so the signals must be “crashing into” each other, well, you’re half right. The cables are thin, at least at human scales. Actually, the entire cable is thick, but it is made up of lots of really thin strands. It’s just that the thinness is apparent only when we think in everyday human scales. To a photon/electromagnetic wave (which is how the information moves through the cables), there is a huge amount of room to maneuver without impeding the flow of all the other photons/waves simultaneously moving through the cable. It’s the difference between two people trying to pass by each other in a normal doorway versus ten-thousand gnats trying to pass by each other in a normal doorway. The humans can barely scrape by, but the gnats likely won’t notice each other. And gnats are absolutely enormous when compared to a photon.
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