Someone Used Wet String To Get a Broadband Connection (vice.com) 78
dmoberhaus shares a Motherboard report: A UK techie with a sense of humor may have found an alternative to expensive corporate broadband cables: some wet string. It's an old joke among network technicians that it's possible to get a broadband connection with anything, even if it's just two cans connected with some wet string. As detailed in a blog post by Adrian Kennard, who runs an ISP called Andrews & Arnold in the UK, one of his colleagues took the joke literally and actually established a broadband connection using some wet string. Broadband is a catch-all term for high speed internet access, but there are many different kinds of broadband internet connections. For example, there are fiber optic connections that route data using light and satellite connections, but one of the most common types is called an asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), which connects your computer to the internet using a phone line. Usually, broadband connections rely on wires made of a conductive substances like copper. In the case of the Andrews & Arnold technician, however, they used about 6 feet of twine soaked in salt water (better conductivity than fresh water) that was connected to alligator clips to establish the connection. According to the BBC, this worked because the connection "is not really about the flow of current." Instead, the string is acting as a guide for an electromagnetic wave -- the broadband signal carrying the data -- and the medium for a waveguide isn't so important.
It's all an illusion (Score:1)
Copper is just a scam incorporated by big Pharma And the Free Masons!
all conductors are Really Crappy Lines (RCL) (Score:2, Interesting)
meaning they all have resistance, capacitance, and inductance. if you are thinking in terms of a transmission line instead of an electrical conductor, this means they all have peaks and nulls. with a supported salt-water solution, I would expect varying conductivity in those abnormal regions, and varying conductivity as the line slowly dies. this is varying resistance, while the distributed capacitance and inductive resonance should be reasonably low. it will confuse the dslam DSP section, but it would wor
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Isn't 24AWG more common?
That's what they used for the old cat3 phone lines. Sometimes as thin as 28AWG, but I didn't think it went down to 22.
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Wet String is more secure than editing your host files /summon APK
Fiber = Satellite !? (Score:2)
Wait... what the shit... Fiber connections now route via satellite!? Why the hell didn't anyone tell me this?
Re:Fiber = Satellite !? (Score:5, Funny)
And if they can already connect fiber to satellites, how come we still don't have space elevators?
Re:Fiber = Satellite !? (Score:5, Funny)
And I thought those techs that had to climb to the top of cell phone towers had it bad.
"Jim, there's a cable fraying about 100 miles up. Get in this spacesuit and begin climbing. Whatever you do, don't look down!"
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could be worse... since you'd need a geostationary orbit so the wire doesn't get pulled off, some poor bugger would have to climb all the way up 36,000km of cable if it needed repair at the top.
FCC claims competition exists (Score:5, Funny)
In other news, after the demonstration in the UK, FCC immediately notices that since everyone has string, viable broadband competition exists everywhere.
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i for one am thoroughly amused.
Re:FCC claims competition exists (Score:4, Informative)
But don't worry, it will never be rolled out in your area because of the incumbent's monopoly.
Re:FCC claims competition exists (Score:4, Funny)
That argument is walking a tightrope.
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More like hanging by a thread.
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In the UK 2Mb/sec for everyone is the current, unmet goal. So this would actually qualify.
"Super fast" is only 24Mb. Fibre is extremely rare.
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It's gold-plated cables that cost about $100 per metre and are exclusively sold by a monster of some kind.
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Was also reading Yamaha's site on XP amps and noticed they described their lineup with "5 Models from 700W to 100W"
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I did this with DC powered Christmas lights almost 2 decades ago... Though, at 3.5Mbps, salty wet string is still better than dial up.
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Net Neutrality is very new (Re:this is absurd.) (Score:2, Interesting)
Is that what you were using before 2015, when the "Net Neutrality" rules went into effect?
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Nah, I'm going to go with IP over Avian Carriers [wikipedia.org]. Of course, there might be some more packet loss during hunting season.
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Two decades ago, one of my employers had a USENET feed from our local university via a 64K ISDN line and the X.25 cloud. The time delay in receiving notifications about talks by guest speakers, meant that it was about a week after the talk that we actually received the notification. They in turn got their feed through JANET. The whole system depended entirely on every university IT department being careful enough not to max out their Internet server disk space, otherwise the feed went down. That was the ori
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The OLPC system from the "One Laptop Per Child" project was designed precisely to support physical distribution of bulky content on physical media from central stations to remote "webs" of OLPC systems to make the content available cheaply and robustly with no wired or radio frequency connection to the upstream Internet. It was a fascinating project and worked surprisingly well for a project with so many unique technologies and approaches.
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Strange. I didn't know radar used photons.
PCIe is remarkably tolerant of being extended (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
And there was me worrying about PCIe risers in things like the Node 202
https://www.techpowerup.com/re... [techpowerup.com]
In other news... (Score:2)
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Pretty much. Every socket in the UK has to have the live and neutral pins shielded. The original mechanism is for the slightly longer earth pin to open a spring loaded shutter. There are also two alternatives now. One requires the live and neutral pins to be inserted at exactly the same time with more or less the same force. The other requires all three pins on the plug to be presented at the same time. Further note that UK plugs that are less than 30 years old also have sleeved live and neutral pins that p
Obligatory (Score:3)
It's an old joke among network technicians that it's possible to get a broadband connection with anything, even if it's just two cans connected with some wet string.
Or, indeed, IPoAC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ).
Latency sucks, but the bandwidth is incredible.
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a motorcyclist with a backpack stuffed full of backup tapes.
Been There, Done That (Score:1)
https://slashdot.org/story/02/01/03/2039218/ethernet-over-assorted-materials
I can't tell if the year of the article is 01 02 or 03
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Posted by timothy on 2002-01-03 17:38
More than a "better conductor" (Score:4, Informative)
Salt water is more than just a better conductor than fresh water. Pure water doesn't conduct electricity at all; it's an insulator, and it's used as such in some specialized applications. Tap water will conduct electricity, but that's because of various impurities, many of which are intentionally introduced for practical purposes, like the chlorine ions that kill microbes and the fluoride added to remineralize your teeth.
A minor nitpick, I know, but I've always been fascinated by the way what we think of as water's conductivity isn't actually a property of water itself.
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Salt water is more than just a better conductor than fresh water. Pure water doesn't conduct electricity at all; it's an insulator,
Pure water is slightly ionic due to its amphoteric properties, though in practice there's not much conductivity to measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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> Pure water doesn't conduct electricity at all;
The resistamce for pure water is rated as roughly 18 MOhm for one square centimeter electrodes, one centimeter apart. This is not a perfect insulator. It's certainly enough to dissipate static charges. Also, water is _rarely_ that pure and neutral in pH in nature.
NBN (Score:2)
Adaptability of ADSL (Score:1)
From the last line of the article (yes I actually read it)
"This can be important when it comes to faulty lines with bad (or even disconnected) joints still providing some level of broadband service.”
I can attest to this. My phone line broke, or at least one of the pair of wires did, about 100 yards from my house (according to the TDR readings taken by the BT engineer that came to fix it). I still retained about 7Mbps down and 1MBPs up but could not make landline phone calls. My normal speeds normally
Broadband? Bah, humbub. (Score:2)
--
.nosig
Kermit, wet string? pah! You were lucky (Score:2)
We were stuck with cu and beating the bits out with sticks against trees.
Bah, humbub. (Score:2)
Now that we've been introduced, whatever you disagree with me about your actions suggest your viewpoint is so flimsy it would fail if you needed to defend it against me. I'm happy to have triggered you.
I'm gonna guess you are one of the toxic misandric people I'm talking about and the worst thing I could possibly say to you is:
Have a great Christmas
Faster to post snail mail (Score:1)
Hey look, there's Australia's new broadband network!