system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Do long-distance fibre optic cables ever make mistakes with the data they transmit?

For example, could I send an email and the recipient views it with a misplaced letter because the fibre optic cable was damaged or just because something weird happened in transmission?
gpt
No, what would actually happen is a packet would be checked (for instance with a cyclic redundancy check at the hardware layer) and if there were a detectable bit error, the packet would be discarded. With a reliable transfer protocol like TCP, the lost packet would be retransmitted and no corruption at the application layer would be occur. There is an industry standard bit error rate for fiber optic connections and it's something like one in a trillion, so it's rare, but does happen.