How does data get transmitted instantly thousands of miles

[IveAlwaysWondered]

There have been a number of inventions, which I don’t know they work e.g. car, aeroplane, microwave but I can have a high level understanding of how they work.
There is one development which I really don’t understand how it works and that is video calling via mobile phones. I can face time someone in Australia and my image and voice is somehow transmitted via the air to my router, then along fibre optic cables across thousands of miles, and then via the air to recipients mobile within milliseconds. How can this be as I find it mind boggling ??

*walkie!

Great thread. This regularly blows my mind.

With a tin can telephone the sound is transmitted through the string, not through air.

I'm guessing it's like looking at a cloud in the sky. The light waves are reaching my eyeballs.

Sorry, I've had a gin and tonic.

The big trick is turning a picture or a sound into a string of numbers. Then the numbers can be sent by flashes of light or radio, a little bit like very fast Morse code!

For a picture, the whole thing is broken down into little dots (pixels) and then each dot is given a number depending on its colour (normally three numbers for the amounts of red, blue, and green you need to mix to get the colour).

For sound, the sound wave is "sampled" a few thousand times per second to see what precise pitch and volume is happening at each instant, then those are put into numbers.

The electronics involved in all the analysis have to be incredibly quick.

I was nearly right😀

Light exhibits characteristics of both waves and particles, the latter of which are described as packets of energy called photons. These waves, or photons, travel in narrow beams called rays. Only when light rays move from one medium to another, such as from air to water, are their linear paths altered.

The electronics involved in all the analysis have to be incredibly quick.

My brother invents chips that do this. He's made millions!.

Most signals are "compressed" (which is also how you can make computer files smaller). If you have to send 100 identical number Xs in a row, it's faster to have a special code to say "100 lots of X" than to send "X" 100 times. That's why pictures with lots of big areas all the same colour shrink more when you compress them.

Love this thread, I wonder about this sort of stuff all the time - wireless charging is definitely witchcraft 🤔

All the instructions are on chips. It's all about the chips.

A silicon chip is an integrated circuit made primarily of silicon. Silicon is one of the most common substances used to develop computer chips. The picture shows an example of a silicon wafer with several individual silicon chips.

Steps on how Silicon is formed into chips
Silicon is formed into pure silicon crystals using the Czochralski method, which uses electric arc furnaces to transform raw materials (mostly quartz rock) into metallurgical grade silicon.
To help reduce any impurities the silicon is converted into a liquid, distilled, and then formed back into rods.
The rods or poly silicon is then broken up into chunks and placed into a special oven that is purged with Argon gas to eliminate any air. The oven melts the chunks when heated to over 2,500° Fahrenheit.
After the chunks melt, the molten silicon is spun in a crucible while a small seed crystal is inserted into the molten silicon.
While continuing to spin and cool the seed is slowly pulled out of the molten silicon resulting in one large crystal. Often weighing more than several hundred pounds.
The large silicon crystal is then tested and X-rayed to make sure it is pure.
If the crystal is pure it is cut into thin slices called wafers, like the one shown on this page.
After being cut, each wafer is buffered to remove any impurities that may have been caused when it was sliced.
Once all buffering is completed, the wafer is inserted into a machine that etches the silicon with the circuit design. These designs are etched using a process called photolithography.
Photolithography works by first coating the wafer using a photo sensitive chemicals that harden when exposed to UV light and then exposing the wafer to the chip design layer using a UV light.
After being exposed, the remaining photo sensitive chemicals are washed away leaving only the chip design. After the chemicals are washed away, the layer may be cooked, blasted with ionized plasma, or bathed in metals. Each chip design has multiple layers, so the photolithography steps are repeated several times for each layer until complete.
Finally, each silicon chip is sliced from the wafer.

Once all buffering is completed, the wafer is inserted into a machine that etches the silicon with the circuit design. These designs are etched using a process called photolithography.

My brother designs the circuits that produce images on screens from the light.

It's all crazy. I'm in UK, but tuned into a university lecture happening live in Australia once, was like the lecturer was next door.

@IveAlwaysWondered
"Electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light, which is 3⋅109 m/s. That means it takes an electronic signal about 13 ms to circle the earth. You can add a factor of 1.5 or so because signals in optical fiber travel slower than signals in air, and another increase because signals aren't routed in straight lines."

In business there is also ultra high frequency trading that relys on very fast internet to the stock market exchanges etc so there is always a need to develop the tech better

Away back in what seems like the dawn of time, I helped write the protocols for that. (God I am old!)

A wafer. So amazing.

Is this similar to how eg bit torrent networks think Napster etc were, many users but bits of data from each for the same file?

I was gonna tell you guys a joke about UDP

But you might not get it

But if it was TCP on the other hand

Enough with that! Ack!

People starting to get this - have you grasped that digital info is binary so those numbers are either 0 or 1 - it's not Decimal like 0-9. So transmitting through air, over wires or as light photons over fibre-optic cables (tiny glass tubes) is easy. The ones are on - pulse, push, send, move or whatever. The zeros are the gaps - no pulse. Like morse code kind of.