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

it’s not a single wire it’s hundreds of fiber optics strands, and inside of each you can have several different colours (technically wavelength) of light without interfering with each other, further more each wavelength cal blink several billion times a second to transmit information, so it’s a lot of capacity

ther are also signal repeaters every once in a while so the signal doesn’t get too weak to be picked up

also the fact that lots of people are using it doesn’t really matter as that’s handled by IP, every packet of information sent has a destination and origin address, so it can independently reach its destination, the cable just sends it, the stuff at the other end knows where to forward it to regardless of how it gets therr