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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.
And if they can already connect fiber to satellites, how come we still don't have space elevators?
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In other news, after the demonstration in the UK, FCC immediately notices that since everyone has string, viable broadband competition exists everywhere.
And I thought those techs that had to climb to the top of cell phone towers had it bad.
"Jim, there's a cable fraying about 100 miles up. Get in this spacesuit and begin climbing. Whatever you do, don't look down!"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
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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.
Two decades ago, one of my employers had a USENET feed from our local university via a 64K ISDN line and the X.25 cloud. The time delay in receiving notifications about talks by guest speakers, meant that it was about a week after the talk that we actually received the notification. They in turn got their feed through JANET. The whole system depended entirely on every university IT department being careful enough not to max out their Internet server disk space, otherwise the feed went down. That was the original "wet piece of string".
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads