How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine An experiment by staff at UK ISP Andrews & Arnold has redefined the meaning of a fibre connection by showing that a piece of wet string can handle ADSL. Our anonymous hero* got the idea for the experiment from a joke that ADSL signal could operate over wet string. Although telephone signals have been successfully passed …
A great deal of discussion has taken place recently about the benefits and costs of Fibre To The Cabinet vs Fibre To The Home. I'm making a plea here for BT to upgrade the remaining 'wet aluminium' links still present in many rural communities with Fibre To The Village( FTTV). I'm fortunate that the village I live in received a fib re connection 2 years earlier than scheduled and we no longer lose service when the village duck pond overflows, but there are hundreds of communities still in that position. I'm still delighted to get 17mbps rather than the 1.5 - 2 mbps I used to receive. Video on demand is now just that rather than a download service which would deliver a watchable film after a couple of hours waiting (or in one case 24 hours)
With Telus here in Vancouver, Canada I'm regularly getting about 135 megabits download
and 110 megabits upload on a home fibre ADSL line for about 85 Canadian Dollars a month
for 500 gigabytes per month. If they move me to a higher tier for about 135 dollars per month
I can get Full Gigabit over Fibre ADSL in the multi-Terabytes per month allowed upload/download range.
Me thinks BT needs to upgrade their network because even with WIRELESS phone-based internet
I'm getting 15 megabits download and about 4 megabits upload...soooooo.....WHAT IS WITH
BRITISH TELECOM that your ADSL lines are so bad?
If you are getting those speeds, you are not using ADSL. The term "Fibre ADSL" is an oxymoron. I'd suggest it's a marketing term dreamed up by someone at your provider.
The maximum theoretically achievable download speed on ADSL is 24mbits on ADSL2+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_line#ADSL_standards
I actually do know the difference between copper-based ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) and the SDSL Telus Fibre 150, which is supposed to be TRULY SYMMETRICAL with the SAME 150 megabits upload and download speeds but that never actually happens. It's typically 135 download and about 110 upload which is GREAT for my Skype videophone sessions which give me truly Hi-Def imagery but useless for most web surfing because of websites that DELAY content until 3rd party ads are displayed which can be MANY SECONDS! Download/upload speeds are actually pretty meaningless for most users on today's websites since LATENCY (i.e. the time between responses for server vs client) is a more important measure.
I can have One Gigabit Ethernet DSL (which is one of the network types I have at work!) but it is USELESS if the websites I surf take XX-number of milliseconds or seconds to respond my input!
NBCnews and CNN are some of the worst where their ads take soooo long to download from third party servers/responders that it effectively BLOCKS my fast access to those websites.
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For those those of you who can afford it, I would try OC-768 (OC = Optical Carrier) which are three STM-256 lines aggregated together running at almost 40,000 Megabits (or about 5 Gigabytes per Second!) And YES you CAN play networked games on it BEAAAAUUUUTIFULLY as me and my colleagues have soooo aptly demonstrated after hours !!!!
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For some engineering fun, you can also paint lines on yourself using conductive bodypaint to make network connections between on-body/wearable computing systems. if you use microvolts at milliamps so you don't interfere with your heart or brain functions (i.e. using the Skin Effect). You can light up your on-body microservers. I remember that from a student project I got to look at during a demo at our local university.
@StargateSG7
Should I mention (Canada, yes, Vancouver, no) my own supply?
256Mbps
Symetric
Uncapped
$50 per month?
Ah. You're right. I probably shouldn't... (blush). Or that if I felt like spending $100 a month, I could get the same symetric uncapped at 1 Gbps...
I actually would like to take a couple of transducers and find the best frequencies for string transmission. It could pulse on/off, pulse the frequency high/low...
But at longer lengths the frequencies would surely drift too low and might get lost in noise from the mains grid (60 Hz here, 50 at Vulture Central), especially if they shared poles. (And then the wind might be a factor, too.)
Very vague memory that there was a phone system in the UK that used the actual physical earth as the return leg of the current for the local loop. IIRC if the phone played up then people had to water the ground stake.
I don't think I am confusing it with mains electricity delivered that way.
@ ac ..
"Very vague memory that there was a phone system in the UK that used the actual physical earth as the return leg of the current for the local loop. IIRC if the phone played up then people had to water the ground stake."
Yes, some of the very early ones. They had to change due to interference from passing trams etc. Railways did too for some of their point to point phones.
The "watering the ground stake" came later. the earth was used when you shared a line with a neighbour. (shared service) The bell ringing current and the "call exchange" button would use it.
"The demise of party lines is one of the often-forgotten benefits of privatisation and subsequent investment."
BT was privatised in 1984. System X rollout was 1980 to 1990, so halfway complete before privatisation.
Compare that to the mess that is 21CN and the billions of public subsidy for the FTTC rollout.
"there was a phone system in the UK that used the actual physical earth as the return leg of the current for the local loop."
I still have most of a 1000' reel of gov. surplus plastic covered steel wire that I think was used for military telephones in that way. We could use it by splitting a pair of high impedance phones and using one earpiece at each end as both microphone and receiver. It's been sitting around in various garages since the 50s and still snip bits off as garden wire.
"The Michie Phone (pronounced "mickey" - named for the Australian who invented it) is another type of custom-built cave telephone system using only a single wire with a high-impedance earth return. These sealed, compact units are currently used for cave rescue communication in Australia and New Zealand, and a similar Single Wire Telephone system was developed in the United Kingdom. These relatively compact and lightweight systems have been used for caving expeditions around the world. Michie Phones are no longer commercially produced, and these single wire systems will not work with two-wire field telephones."
https://fieldphone.blogspot.co.uk/
Once its been recycled (as it were) I'd have no problem using what's left of my finest Arabica to moisten the string. Though I'd suggest using a pot shaped container to collect the fluid. I wouldn't recommend applying the fluid directly to the string, just in case someone makes a call and it activates the ringer, but then again, if that's your thing, go for it.
Someone decided at Acornsoft that our new office (1984) should be wired up by BT. At least the phone system mostly worked. The Econet was another thing altogether. Spent a 'happy' few days crawling round with voltage source and multimeter 'snagging' i.e. re-wiring *every* sodding Econet socket. Five wires (Clock +/-, Data +/-, Ground) gave the BT monkeys a lot of permutations to get wrong, including not bothering to connect some at random. Oh, and the fact that they managed to shoe-horn 500m of cable into one floor, which when a) detected by anomalous resistance between adjacent sockets and b) optimised by removing random loops only actually needed 120m ISTR.
I too would like some salt water for my rural strands of phone line. The fresh water stops it working eventually...
@skswales
Oh - if that's Sean, hi!
Anyway, fond memories. OK - not really fond. New client, has just had new building built over reasonably wide acreage site. I arrive to 'finish the networking'. Client proudly shows me the thirty-five or so CAT 5 cables in the machine room. Non-terminated CAT5. Non-terminated, identical, unmarked white cables, disappearing into a hole in the wall. Heart sinking, I ask where the cables run to. So the site manager says he'll show me. It is, of course, an open field site. Where 'field' is the operative word. It is, of course, tipping down with rain. _He_ is, of course, wearing wellies. Me? Er - no. So we walk, and we go in doors, and we look at bits of white, non-terminated, unmarked CAT 5 coming out of various holes in various walls. He giggles happily, gives me a site map and asks me if it's going to take more than half an hour because it gets dark early that time of year?
Some nights, I still wake up screaming...
He giggles happily, gives me a site map and asks me if it's going to take more than half an hour because it gets dark early that time of year?
I think I met his NZ counterpart.
Amazing what a muddy field can do for one's piece of mind.
I'm quite sure they still haven't found his body....
(joke for those who missed the ICON, serious!)
Ok ok, so dry string didn't work, wet string didn't work, but salted wet string did work. In other words, an ADSL signal carried over salt water and not so much the string.
I may have unbelievable news, but salt water is actually a very good conductor and will happily carry any electrical signal.
If the string isn't actually required, then shirley this would work over a stream of piss.
The duration of the connection would only be limited by bladder capacity, and/or how long you could endure having a crocodile clip attached to your unmentionables. The quality of your aim might also be a factor.
This could be the next YouTube challenge...
The problem with a stream of piss is surface tension as it rapidly turns from a stream to droplets. I recall there was a Mythbusters episode about pissing on an electric fence or the third rail or some other charged whatsit.
As for it drying out couldn't one just leave the loose ends in a bit of fluid and have it act as wick?
The problem with a stream of piss is surface tension as it rapidly turns from a stream to droplets. I recall there was a Mythbusters episode about pissing on an electric fence or the third rail or some other charged whatsit.It doesn't turn into a stream of droplets fast enough. I worked in a mine mill decades ago and one bloke kept pissing in the corner instead of going to the toilet. Somebody wired a piece of metal to the three-phase power and pissing on that killed him.
Related:
When I was a young lad, a neighbourhood kid took a pee on a light pole, with the hatch open. Cue backflip, instant unconsciousness and lots of cries and swearing afterwards. Apparently no lasting effects for my neighbour, except for his new nickname: "Electroman".
Yeah, children are cruel.
So take this to a logical conclusion, it's the salt water, not the string, that matters. What we need is long thin thing that can hold salt water. Sort of tube-shaped. Who was it said "The internet is just a series of tubes"?
Next up: replacing long haul fibres with two LED bike lights.
Wait, let me get this straight, theoretically....
I could connect 2 PC's in a single homemade desk, use appropriately protected water cooling containing salt water, with a loop connecting both devices, and as well as cooling, I could use it as a means of low speed data connection?
This yardstick needs adding to the register's conversion tables at
Adding salt water as a conductive mechanism is so "science-fair" project. If you go into those things then perhaps gold-infused string?
No, I think the right way to conduct this experiment is to send ADSL signals across a string between two human operators tugging at it and writing down the bits that corresponded to each tug from the other end. Add in all the various level-N handshakes and it could take an hour+ to tell the other end "FU".
Didn't someone - possibly Cisco - develop switches or routers (or possibly media converters) that would pass a relatively high datastream over pretty much any connected pair? i'm thinking circa 2003 - 2004? from memory, they demonstrated it with some straightened out coathangers and also provided data showing some respectable speeds for the time over something mad like Dannert coils?
here in OZ my ADSL connection goes via a pit in ground outside my house and it is always full of water and I have absolutely crap speed.Here in Oz, my ADSL went via wires on poles to the exchange and gave me 1,500 bps 24/7. My NBN goes through the air via wireless and rarely exceeds 6 Mb/s. Often it's 0 bps. It costs 10 times as much as ADSL and I have 10% of the bandwidth. Fraudband...
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