Grandma's Phone, DSL, and the Copper They Share (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: DSL is high-speed Internet that uses the same twisted pair of copper wire that still works with your Grandmother's wall-mounted telephone. How is that possible? The short answer is that the telephone company is cheating. But the long answer delves into the work of Claude Shannon, who figured out how much data could be reliably transferred using a given medium. His work, combined with that of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley (pioneers of channel capacity and the role noise plays in these systems), brings the Internet Age to many homes on an infrastructure that has been in use for more than a hundred years.

Comments

It's an hack

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have been nice if DSL never existed, dial-up would be the norm and websites would not be bloated, no social media or other bullshit.
Instead companies keep profiting while not investing anything into upgrading the rotting copper.

Re:What year is this?

[c]

The scary thing is I believe a lot of people likely still use it because that's all they can get.

I'd be thrilled if I could get DSL.

Re:Everyone's phone, DSL and copper

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I guarantee the US can, too, as it's all computers now.

My dad refused to give up his rotary (a phone company rental bakelite black, at that) because the phone company continued to want to charge extra for "premium" touch tone service, even long after it was actually a drag on them.

Last time I had a land line, around 2010, it was rotary-only, so whenever I had to use a menu, as to pay a bill, after dialing I would switch the phone to touch tone.