How does telephone signal transfer work?

[Jncik]

hello, this is not a homework question, but i can't understand something, we're currently learning about signals, bandwidth, transfer rate etc, but i don't understand something

i can understand that when we talk we create signals with a specific frequency, then this signal travels through the wire and goes to the other side, but how does this traveling occur? where does it go? i don't think that there are two wires connected from my home to the other home, how is it possible then to communicate? and even if the signal goes to some point where it gets processed and after that they send it to the recipient, how is it possible to process so many thousand signals at the same time? and what does this process include?

im sorry if i sound stupid but i can't understand how this whole thing works...

 

[skeptic2]

Imagine the telephone office has a battery with a circuit loop going to your house. As long as your telephone is on hook, no current flows. When you take the phone off hook current flows around the loop from the telephone office to your phone. When you dial a number or speak into the phone, you modulate that current from the office. The telephone office interprets the number you dialed and sends a ring tone to the phone you dialed. When the dialed phone picks up, current flows in the circuit and your voice and the voice of the person on the other phone jointly modulate the current.

For long distance calls the telephone office connects with another office and it makes the connection with the dialed party. Yes the telephone office is a huge switch connecting any of thousands of input lines to any of thousands of dialed lines.

 

[Jncik]

Imagine the telephone office has a battery with a circuit loop going to your house. As long as your telephone is on hook, no current flows. When you take the phone off hook current flows around the loop from the telephone office to your phone. When you dial a number or speak into the phone, you modulate that current from the office. The telephone office interprets the number you dialed and sends a ring tone to the phone you dialed. When the dialed phone picks up, current flows in the circuit and your voice and the voice of the person on the other phone jointly modulate the current.

For long distance calls the telephone office connects with another office and it makes the connection with the dialed party. Yes the telephone office is a huge switch connecting any of thousands of input lines to any of thousands of dialed lines.

thanks, this made it clear :)