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

They do, but networking is designed to handle that.

Your data is broken up into chunks called packets. The beginning of each packet tells the networking equipment where it came from and where it’s going – called a header (a bit like sending a letter in an envelope).

So it doesn’t matter if the packets arrive out of order or mixed in with somebody elses (in fact they are designed to), the networking equipment at the other end just reads the header and forwards it on to it’s destination.