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Gigabyte Modems over Electric Lines

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the dream-lives-on dept.

Ryan Wilshere writes "C|Net has an article on so called 'Power Modems'. They claim they can do Gigabyte transfers over regular electrical line. Dallas-based start-up Media Fusion has won a U.S. patent on a process it says can send data, video and voice over electric wires at speeds thousands of times faster than current high-speed Internet access technologies." They keep on trying. We keep on hoping.

3 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. I just want.... by MoToMo · · Score: 4

    The UPS that will keep the internet connection live in the event of loss of electricity...

    :) -Dan

  2. Media Fusion is a quack... by Hobbex · · Score: 4
    The Media Fusion thing was posted a week ago in this thread. Now that the article linked from that thread is not slashdotted anymore, go read it. The whole article is like one big joke. A couple of the thing they bring up (I forget all the points I LOLed at).
    • The guy is the most brilliant man ever.
    • He has written his own OS, so Windows will not be necessary when his system is launched. No word about how he managed to write an OS all by himself, or how he plans to overcome the problems of all other (closed) alternative OSes.
    • He has been nominated for the Nobel price. Actually, the Nobel Prize is not like the Academy Awards, pretty much any proffessor can nominate somebody, so it might be possible. The article goes on to say that he will probably win it (just like the hundreds of inventors of patented hacks that have done so before him.)
    • His invention, really just a hack that saves us time in not having to draw fiber even if it does work as stated, will change the world. The article features a guide to which companies like MS, HP, TI, and Apple will survive (FYI, MS and HP won't, Apple will "probably be more adaptable", and TI will surge getting a license to make the chips needed).
    • The guy is actually a philantropist. Which is why he has patented the technique, and has no plans to implement any of this himself, but only get rich off licensing.
    • He has figured out how to use the same technique with the earths magnetic field, to communicate over the whole world. Yes, it actually says this.

    Go read the article, I'm trolling in the least. It's fucking ubelievable.


    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  3. On basic physics. by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 4

    Of course it was around the the conductor - all electronic signals are transmitted as changes in the magnetic/electric fields around a conductor - thats basic physics.....

    Um, no.

    Signals in most circuits are trasmitted as a flow of current _within_ wires, driven by an electric field gradient _within_ the wires (called "voltage"). Electric fields outside the wires try to move current between the wire and anything nearby, but this is an unwanted side effect, stopped by something called "insulation". However, the electric fields also result in capacitive coupling between nearby wires, which causes something called "capacitive cross-talk". This is minimized by keeping wires far apart and minimizing the amount of parallel surface area of conducting regions.

    As a side effect of the current flow, a magnetic field is set up both around and within the wires. The current flowing within the wire and the magnetic fields around the wire are intimately connected; you can't have one without the other, and they interact very strongly with each other. You can't "transmit information in magnetic fields around the wire" without interacting with currents in the wire too - the magnetic field is _caused_ by local currents in the wire. In most systems, magnetic fields are an unwanted side effect. As there is mutual inductance between any two wires in a circuit, the magnetic fields caused by current in one wire will set up currents in other wires. This is called "inductive cross-talk". It is severe only for wires that are very close to each other, or that have a particularly vulnerable geometry.

    For an excellent book on the basic physics involved, I recommend "Fundamentals of Physics, Fifth Edition", by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker. Another good reference is "Physics for Scientists and Engineers, Extended Version" by Tipler.