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High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud
An anonymous reader writes "You might have laid Ethernet through some pretty aggressive environments, but how about through a 4-inch diameter steel pipe immersed in electrically conductive mud at pressures up to 1000 atmospheres, temperatures up to 150 deg C, and with vibrational accelerations of hundreds of g?
The Department of Energy has announced the invention of a system to allow data transmission up to 1 Mbit/s along drillpipe. That might not sound too fast, but the current technology uses some pretty neat electromechanical engineering to get ... 10 bits per second (on a good day). This will revolutionize the oil industry's ability to see where its wells are going and steer them into pockets of oil."
I read this as M.U.D. at first (Multi User Dungeon).
"While you drill for oil, you see a vibrant pixie nearby".
"Something is scribbled in the mud here.."
The message in the mud reads: /."
"high-speed network via M.U.D. is under construction; announce it on
Possible exits: Down, Up, Home
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL? The drill doesn't need all that bandwidth.... or perhaps it needs to fulfill its porn fill of the day? ;)
Maybe eventually they can put that dust collecting above the ceiling tiles at our school to good use. I mean, the layer is about five inches thick.
Or, they could just use wifi...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Hey, if you used that mud as a 802.11b antenna or something, you would be WARMUDSLINGING!
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I've had to put Cat5 through sales and marketing cubes!
Much easier communication than the old "pulsed-bullshit" telemetry, though.
Jouster
"I run my drill on Linux! There's a public-domain webserver where you can view the realtime stats!"
/.'ed drillpipe.
Ugh,
Jouster
Multi-User Dungeon ... and the list goes on.
Multi-User Domain
Multi-User Dimension
Multiple User Domain
Multiple User Dialogue
Mauve Ugly Ducks
Jouster
This is awesome, I am going to the office in waders and I am going to start packing in mud,pipes, and oil through the new HR department!
/.!
I am going to get away with it because I will link this article in an email to engineering discussing how this will avoid the plenum/firecode problem with UTP. I will send a second email to accounting discussing the massive ROI on using mud over expensive cabling projects.
The the only part that will be better than watching their email open for two hours will be watching them cry about having to process my raise and promotion! This is the first Monday I have looked forward to in a LONG time, THANKS
to introduce you to her.
Maybe take her to a movie and dinner....
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
In one fell swoop, every citizen in the entire country of Elbonia would suddenly have broadband access... if only they had computers.
~Philly
"My modem is slower than mud"...
.. my friends and I play quake that is networking through my septic's leech field.
So what if it smells like shit and it's outside, it's still better than routing all those pesky cat 5 cables.
I'll admit that sometimes we get some bad throughput so we have to feed Big Joe some beans to get the system going again.
Live web cams
Surely you mean 100,000X faster??
Mudcam.
Look for it soon, only $1 a minute in streaming video.
Written transcript: Black, black, brown, gray, black, brown...
I bet this was discovered at the university of elbonia. They know mud.