10 ms·
ADSL works over wet string (2017)
- entuno 2y agoThere's also a follow up post that goes into a little bit more technical detail: https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/please-upgrade-me-to-adsl-over-wet.html https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/please-upgrade-me-to-adsl-over-w...
- hcfman 2y agoGreat experiment!
- latexr 2y ago> Don't dare touch the string though... Why not? Is it dangerous, ou would it just make it stop working?
- planede 2y agoWell of course, I assume that's what my ISP is using.
- Rinzler89 2y agoTelekom Germany?
- YeahThisIsMe 2y agoHas to be, it would explain my experience.
- IntelMiner 2y agoCould just as well be NBNco in Australia
- Rinzler89 2y agoRogers in Canada?
- lytfyre 2y agoI believe Rogers are running DOCSIS-over-Sewage, the competing cable standard.
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoNawh, they're using ATM over finches. Those squeaks and chirps you hear outside are actually your packets.
- bpye 2y agoI’m surprised they didn’t stick with the standard RFC 2549 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2549
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- owenphen 2y agois this just a bot reposting old content?
- sph 2y ago[flagged]
- bmacho 2y agoIs this suspicious or just weird? You don't think it happened? edit: especially that OP indeed posts an old submission every hour.
- Sharlin 2y agoOP appears legit, but yeah, woah that submission rate. Must be automated.
- walterbell 2y ago> After 13 years you have found the password to your account Subtle :) > logged in to call OP a bot for some reason? Why did the Persona call the Kettle black? Unsee!
- Dylan16807 2y ago> Why did the Persona call the Kettle black? > Unsee! ??? > Subtle :) It's too subtle for me, care to explain? I don't know if your comment is trying to point out the similar account ages, but that's not the point at all. sph has a zillion comments over 13 years, and owenphen has just this one. There is no pot calling the kettle black.
- walterbell 2y agoMy comment is supporting sph.. (whose comment shouldn't be flagged). A known human-by-profile fanf2f is accused of bot-hood by an unknown actor burning a 13-year (2011 vintage) nym/persona. sph calls that out without breaching HN guidelines. > ??? 2011 was a good year for grapes, er broadcasting, https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/reforming-smith-mundt https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/blog/reforming-smith-mundt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City A denizen of one city must dutifully "unsee" (that is, consciously erase from their mind or fade into the background) the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city – even if they are an inch away. This separation is emphasised by the style of clothing, architecture, gait, and the way denizens of each city generally carry themselves.
- whalesalad 2y agoMy wife and I have been looking for a property out in the rural parts of Michigan. One of the homes we went to visit with our realtor had left out a laptop computer in order to test the internet. Damn thing has ADSL and gets 2.2mbps down lmao. I do not miss the ADSL days.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>Damn thing has ADSL and gets 2.2mbps down lmao. Had they considered an infrastructure upgrade to carrier pigeons, cans on a string, or smoke signals?
- ElFitz 2y agoI started calculating the bandwidth for a continuous stream of carrier pigeons carrying 256GB flash drives, at different frequencies. But the latency and loss rate would make it all worthless.
- Rinzler89 2y agoLatency definitely, but imagine pigeons carrying 8TB M.2 PCIe Gen-5 sticks strapped to their backs. That's some crazy throughput rivaling most domestic internet connections.
- makr17 2y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/9of84w/never_underestimate_the_bandwidth_of_a_station/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/comments/9of84w/ne... Rings true for me. In my younger days I was "privileged" to catch an early morning flight to San Jose with a stack of tapes that I then drove to Palo Alto. All because a RAID array had gone kaput and tapes in a carry-on provided better bandwidth than the upstream from the office where our backups were.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoMy home used to get 4 Mbps down until water got into the paper insulated trunk lines and became unusable. My new pair maxxed out at 2. So happy that all my broadband internet surcharges were spent on improving the customer experience.
- OnACoffeeBreak 2y ago100 Mbps Ethernet over barbed wire was demonstrated back in 1995. [0] "Only four properties really affect the performance of most digital transmission structures. The "big four" transmission-line properties are impedance, delay, high-frequency loss, and crosstalk." Dr Johnson then goes to describe these properties in barbed wire. 0: https://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm https://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm P.S. Yes, this is the Dr. Howard Johnson of the famed "High-Speed Digital Design" book.
- mschuster91 2y agoAnd a hundred years before that, you had farmers running DIY phone setups over their barbed wire fences [1]. [1] https://gizmodo.com/barbed-wire-fences-were-an-early-diy-telephone-network-1493157700 https://gizmodo.com/barbed-wire-fences-were-an-early-diy-tel...
- Scoundreller 2y ago“ Each house had its own distinctive ring—two short one long, for example—and it was considered impolite to listen in on another's call.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony) A party line! Our cabin still has a grandfathered one with the distinctive ring. I think we pay 1/4 of the regular rate so we keep it despite everyone having a cell phone now. I don’t think there’s anyone else on the line. Got a funny spam call with a recording for some miracle septic tank treatment. It asked me to press 1 for more information and I can’t do that on a rotary phone. Scammers don’t understand their target market. (We also don’t have septic system, just an outhouse.)
- coding123 2y agoThat's how to get your internet to dry up.
- rnhmjoj 2y agoYeah, ADSL being so good at handling a crappy physical medium is both a blessing and a curse. If it weren't for these technologies we would have probably had to replace those rusty copper pairs decades ago for fiber optics. Instead the protocols continued to improve (ADSL2, ADSL2+, VDSL, VDSL2+, vectoring, supervector...) and allowed ISPs to provide usable network speeds without spending a cent on improving the infrastructure.
- elzbardico 2y agoCopper thieves to the rescue! Due to them, most ISPs in big cities in Brazil are switching to fiber to the home.
- ivm 2y agoMostly rural southern Chile got fiber before the coaxial-dependent capital because of the same problem.
- hocuspocus 2y agoYou still need to bring fiber relatively close to the building, so it's not exactly happening without spending a cent. Fun fact: Switzerland operates the only significant G.fast deployment in the world. The technology was such a flop that Huawei stopped making the hardware.
- mschuster91 2y ago> Fun fact: Switzerland operates the only significant G.fast deployment in the world. Nope. In Germany, M-net (Munich) and NetCologne operate massive g.fast networks, and if you don't want Huawei, go for Adtran's 516 lineup on the ISP side and AVM on the CPE side.
- tgpc 2y agoZyxel and Fast Networks are also good on the ISP side (Not sure Fast Networks is still a thing - website seems to be down - but I run one of their DSLAMs and am happy with it)
- mbreese 2y agoThis is funny. About 10 years ago, I had bonded ADSL for my internet (yay sonic.net). The idea being that two lines bonded together would have twice as much bandwidth as a single line. Each line had a max rate of 20Mbps, so I had a max of 40Mbps combined. It worked pretty well initially, but over time it degraded horribly. Because you could see stats for each line independently, I could tell that one line was operating at ~18Mbps and the other was around 2 and there was a lot of error recovery going on. After much complaining, I found out that one line was degraded and somehow reacted to rain (water got in the trunk somehow). And no, AT&T wasn’t going to fix the broken line. I chose to just use the single (good) line. So, yes, I can confirm this does work in the field… but with about as much practically as you’d expect.
- Scoundreller 2y agoI’m always a bit amazed when every home has 2 lines running to it, and probably 99% of those second lines never get used, but telcos figured it was worth it for those occasional 2nd lines/fax lines or redundancy instead of ever needing to run a 2nd pull. Is this just a North America thing or an everywhere thing?
- mordechai9000 2y agoYou could always move a line to another pair if one went bad. Not sure if that was part of the motivation or just a happy coincidence.
- lm411 2y agoI'd guess that back in the 80's and 90's those 2nd lines were used a lot more than 1%. Nowadays I wonder if even 1% of a single line is used. ;)
- Stratoscope 2y agoOnly two? Around 1995 we had four phone lines: home, home office, fax, and modem. There were only three physical pairs, so two of the lines (I think the voice lines) came off one physical pair with a frequency division splitter. Some time later I saw a Pacific Bell truck and crew trenching the street. (We had underground utilities.) I excitedly asked them, "Are you running fiber?" "No, just more copper." I guess they saw the demand for lots of copper lines per house and decided to meet it! The underground phone lines did lead to some excitement one time. Their water sealing wasn't very good, and after a heavy rain the line would get noisy and clicky. During one of these episodes, we got a loud knock on the door: "San Jose Police! Open up!" I ran to the door and asked what was going on. One of the officers said, "We got a 911 call from this address. The dispatcher couldn't hear anyone on the line, and no one answered when they called back. So we're required to come out and investigate the situation." I replied, "That's odd, neither of us called 911. Oh... I think I know what may have happened. Come in and I'll show you." We went to the kitchen and I put the wall phone (remember those?) on speaker and had the officers listen. It was clicking up a storm! Then I asked them if they remembered the old rotary phones (they did). I explained how the phone dial worked by breaking and making the circuit N times for each digit you were dialing. And it must have been that in that flurry of clicks that the circuit was broken nine times, then once, then once again.
- mhandley 2y agoI remember Van Jacobson saying in the early 90s that IP would work over two tin cans and a piece of wet string. For several years, I set this as a possible student project, partly as a joke, but it was had no takers for quite a few years. Then in 2009 a student finally took me up on the offer. The main things we learned were that the tin cans were a bad idea (undesirable resonances), and that you could either do on/off coding at the string's resonant frequency, or try to stay well away from the resonant frequency, but then the signal strength was very low but you could distinguish multiple frequencies so do more interesting coding. In the end the project was successful, but the student ran out of time before he could really investigate in great depth.
- anyfoo 2y agoWhat an awesome project! Was the bandwidth that narrow at the resonant frequency? Intuitively, I wouldn't have expected that "wet string" has a high Q. :) If I had been your student, I would have had great fun with it.
- chillingeffect 2y agoResonace/ringing is essentially the enemy of bandwidth. Consider a taut guitar string... you can't change its magnitude easily.
- anyfoo 2y agoWhat do you mean, cannot change its magnitude easily? I can just pluck it harder or softer? Do you mean frequency response? And the bandwidth of a resonant circuit depends on its Q. Hence my question about a wet string’s Q, which might well be different from a guitar string’s Q. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/uploads/articles/series-resonant-circuits-graph3.jpg https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/uploads/articles/series-res...
- m463 2y agoWhat happened if a carrier pigeon landed on the line?
- jedberg 2y agoI remember back around '98, there were a bunch of product that you could get that would turn the electrical wiring in your house into an ethernet network. You'd plug the thing in and then as long as the other end was on the same breaker, it would work great. I used it in my apartment to get network from one room to the other. This reminds me of that.
- prima-facie 2y agoActually serious question: Would this work as fallback tech in a war ridden zone? Not over wet string, but over something like reclaimed copper wire from whatever is around. Suppose laying fiber would be too risky and is too fragile, cannot be patched up in the field.
- I_Am_Nous 2y agoFiber can be patched, but it take a lot more than just twisting the ends together like you can with copper. Usually they have a portable fusion splicer in case of a fiber cut and can at the very least fuse a length of fiber on each end of the break so it can pass light again.
- floodle 2y agoI don't know what a fusion splicer is but I want one
- h2odragon 2y agoThe tool to make connections in fiber optic cables. They've got little handheld ones which are awesome. https://www.fiberfoxamerica.com/fusion-splicer https://www.fiberfoxamerica.com/fusion-splicer
- dotancohen 2y agoSounds like the type of thing one would borrow from Geordie Laforge.
- svilen_dobrev 2y agoah i don't know. A 2023 (~cheap) car reverse camera for a videorecorder with (looking like) usb protocol on the wire between, does not work if cable is more than 5m. Or if it is another 5m cable (utp, ftp, 4x1mm, combination, whatever. Only that initial one). Period.
- bgnn 2y agoMy home internet connection is VDSL2 and I see very consistent 100Mbps+ over the original phone cables of my house, which is built in 1933.
- lyu07282 2y agoKind of by necessity the nature of ADSL, how else are you gonna offer broadband internet over the (by now) rotten infrastructure you were privatized into "owning". How can you squeeze as much profit (and as many bits per second) as humanly possible out of it, without ever investing a single cent more into your infrastructure than absolutely necessary? By relying on ever more absurd hacks.
- twic 2y agoThis is why I get my internet from A&A, my wiring is pretty much this.
- DeathArrow 2y agoWay faster than dial up with a 56k modem.