How does a method of communication, say an e-mail or phone call make its way into an underground/underwater fiber optic cable?
In: Technology
Your phone digitally encodes your analog voice waves into 1s and 0s through a process called sampling. These digital 1s and 0s are nothing more than voltages switching on and off, or between a higher and lower voltage (5 volts for a “1” and 0 volts for a “0”, for example). The phone sends a radio wave modulated by these 1s and 0s to the cell tower. The cell tower receives this signal along with others, and multiplexes or shuffles the multiple data streams from other phone calls together, and sends the data over a fiber optic cable connected to a backhaul network, which connects to the core network consisting of fiber optics, switches, routers, and frames. The data stream travels to its destination using address bits and other overhead data for routing, and the recipient’s phone decodes the voice data received from its own local cell tower and converts it back into an analog waveform which is sent to the phone’s speaker. The process is similar for landlines, except there the analog audio is routed to a local switching office (central office) which does all the digital encoding and multiplexing with in-house equipment.
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