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.

Comments

Net Neutrality is very new (Re:this is absurd.)

[mi]

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.

Is that what you were using before 2015, when the "Net Neutrality" rules went into effect?

all conductors are Really Crappy Lines (RCL)

[swschrad]

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.