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The Magic Box Hoax
Rasvar writes "Here is an interesting article from The Florida Times-Union about a high tech hoax that managed to pull in the likes of Blockbuster Video, US West, Ted Turner, Sen Orrin Hatch and numerous others. I actually attended one of the "demonstrations" of this device years back. I came away cynical becuase of the way he presented stuff. Sometimes it is good to be a cynic. This is a very good article on an impressive high tech scam."
Madison Priest was a big con-artist, true, but if Ted Turner and the rest did their research, wouldn't they have realized that there are physical limitations to a POTS line's bandwidth?
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
You can find the patent here. It's completely bogus. Any patent examiner with a minimum background in electrical engineering should have thrown this out, and anybody investing millions of dollars in it should have had it checked out by someone who actually knows something about electrical engineering. This is really no different from the patent and investment follies of the Internet bubble.
If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !
This is a classic bit of snake oil - "I have this wonderful thing, and you can get a piece of it, but DON'T GO BACK THERE!"
That otherwise intelligent people fell for this just goes to show how most of us don't always act logically all the time.
Besides - pushing video over CAT-3 isn't hard: you just need enough OOMPH to deal with the attenuation, which over a few feet is not so bad. I've seen little boxes you can buy that allow you to send a VCR's output to another room over 100 feet of little thin zip-cord - all they are is a balun (balanced to unbalanced transformer) that matches the 75 ohm output of the VCR to the wire.
It's pushing that same signal over MILES of cable while somebody else is pushing a different signal over a different pair of wires in the same bundle without interfering with each other that's the tricky bit. Solve that with enough signal to noise ratio to allow multi-megabit transmission, and you will be rich. You also will be violating half a dozen laws of physics, but....
www.eFax.com are spammers
POTS is, among other things, limited by the resoultion of the ADC at the telco. Since you telephone signal goes into a 64 kbps digital channel there, you cannot get any more than 64 kbps out of the analog end. DSL requires the telco to install new hardware that splits the high frequency and low freqency components, sends one to the phone connection and one to the DSL hardware.
Even so, noise, loss, and crosstalk are all problems for DSL causing it to be limited range, especially for the high bandwidth versions. In addition, equipment installed to prevent ground loops and improve the quality of audio freqnecy transmission, especially in older or long distance phone runs wasn't designed to pass high frequency and can wreak havoc on DSL. None of these problems have to do with the wire itself, though. Copper has plenty of bandwidth, the purpose of coax and so forth is to decrease losses and interference.
But it sounds like this guy was claiming to jam several megabits of data through the 64 kbit phone switch, which is obviously impossible.
Wired mag ran a story last year about a guy with a similar scam. P.T. Barnum rules!
According to the article, it was Teddy Turner, Ted Turner's son.
carefull that goes to goatse.cx
YHBT Jargon File
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
...townsend didn't surpass it!
The "classic" limitation on analogue dialup modems was the quantization error introduced by the analogue to digital conversion on both ends.
However -- 56k depends on one end of the connection being DIGITAL . You're eliminating quant error on one side of the connection, thus you can get better downstream speeds. Upstream speeds, if you notice, are still limited to 33.6k due to quant error on the end user's modem.
There is no magic here. No laws are being surpassed or violated here. Shannon is still safe.
Check out www.etreppid.com to see a company making similar claims with software (basically, the old "unlimited yet perfect compression" scam). The company is ran by Warren Trepp, famous for being the number 2 man in Milken's famous junk bond scam.
It's ironic that in making his fake high bandwidth phone line, he actually solved another networking problem - how to make high bandwidth power lines. Sure his solution (running a coax in the power line) isn't a technical revolution, but it is at least as good as every other scheme for doing networking over the power grid.
In the demo, however, they were just going to do a DS-1. I took a t-berd DS-1 test set, a Navtel protocol analyzer, and some cables, including a DS-1 loopback plug (RJ-48). We met them at some hospital in Jacksonville, present were Madison Priest and Mark Strong. Mark video taped the whole thing, which made me kind of nervous.
They took us down to the communications room in the basement of the hospital. There were two Packard Bell computers sitting on the floor. They were both plugged into the same powerstrip. The interesting part was there was not one power cable, but three for each computer. I think two of them ran into one of the ISA slot openings, and were "expoxied" in by what looked like latex caulking. It was a real mess.
Each computer also had an RJ-45 for the T-1, and an internal analog modem. I plugged the t-1 test set into one computer, and a loopback plug into the other. Madison then used hyperterm or procom (I forget which) to dial from one computer to the other thru the Hospital's PBX. When the modems synced up, the T1 came up. I verified I was seeing the loopback, sent some different bit patterns, and errors. When he pulled the pots line, the T1 went down (loss of signal).
Next, they wanted to show it ran over long distances. They used one computer to dial a number in my office in xxxx which was forwarded to the number of the other computer next to us. This worked just as expected. The T-1 came right up. We let the test set run awhile to make sure the line was error free. Mark Strong made it a point to videotape him asking me if it was working. About all I could say was that "It appears to be."
We went to a conference room nearby to talk while the test ran. Madison was pretty strange. He got, what I would term, angry several times during the meeting. I stayed out of it pretty much till at what point our VP asked me what else I needed to verify to make sure that it was capable of carry a T-1. I said I wanted to put the protocol analyzer on the circuit and make a call through xxxx. Then I wanted to send frames and measure the latency of the circuit. I said I know about how much latency I should see, given that signals travel about 100 miles per millisecond.
Then all hell broke loose. They refused to allow that test, or any others. They claimed I was trying to steal their technology. We ended up packing up and going home.
Over the next several months, we heard from them about doing more tests. We wanted to do a long distance video feed, but the week that was supposed to happen, weather was not good (I think it was too icy) for their general aviation plane to make it. They started calling themselves VisionTek, and they informed us, of all things, that we wouldn't see the latency we expected because this thing could transfer a signal faster than the speed of light.
I had suspected the power cords were the actual data path, and my latency test was going to test that theory, but they never allowed it to happen. I don't think they had come up with the "faster than light" story by that time, so I believe we caught them with their pants down.
I don't think we ever invested any money in them. I always believed it to be a hoax, but was just doing my job to investiagate it. I also knew that Madison Priest was an ex-con, and after witnessing his temper, I didn't want to become any more involved than I had to. I certainly wasn't going to challenge him or do anything that would lead him to believe that I *personally* was the reason he didn't get money from my company.
As a matter of fact, I think I should post this anonymously if you don't mind...