ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Optical Carrier transmission rates

Okay, so imagine you have a bunch of toys that you want to send to your friend who lives far away. But you can't just throw them in a box and send them through the mail like you normally would, because they might break or get lost.

Instead, you decide to use a special machine called an optical carrier. This is a really fancy machine that uses light to send things really quickly over long distances.

Now, when you want to send things using the optical carrier, you have to choose how much stuff you want to send at one time. This is called the "transmission rate."

Imagine that you have three different sets of toys that you want to send - a small set with only a few toys, a medium set with some more toys, and a big set with a lot of toys. If you want to send the small set, you can choose a low transmission rate, like 1.5 megabits per second (Mbps). This means you're only sending a little bit of information at a time, but it won't take very long to send everything.

If you want to send the medium set of toys, you might choose a medium transmission rate, like 10 Mbps. This means you're sending more information at once, so it might take a little longer to send everything.

And if you want to send the big set of toys, you would choose a high transmission rate, like 100 Mbps or even 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). This means you're sending a LOT of information all at once, so it might take a bit longer to send everything, but it will still be really fast compared to other methods of sending things.

So, basically, the optical carrier transmission rate is just how much information you're sending at one time using a fancy machine that sends things really quickly using light. The higher the transmission rate, the more information you're sending at once, but it might take a bit longer to send everything.