Fact: Broadband Can Work Over a Piece of Wet String

Megalith

Megalith

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A UK techie with a sense of humor may have found an alternative to expensive corporate broadband cables: wet string. The engineer was able to reach a downlink speed of 3.5Mbps, which is slow by today's standards, but way faster than yesteryear's dial-up internet speeds, albeit over a short distance.

Broadband services are a wonderful innovation of our time, using multiple frequency bands to carry signals over wires. One of the key aspects of the technology is its ability to adapt to the length and characteristics of the line on which it is deployed. It has always been said that ADSL will work over a bit of wet string. Well, one of our techies took it upon himself to try it today at the office.
 
This really isn't news, and i'm sure some retired engineer who worked at Bell Labs already did this without it being 'news'.
 
It's also not broadband according to the FCC. That requires 25mb to be classified as such. :p
 
Satire comedy is best when there's truth behind it. Like this, it just goes to show how ridiculous it is to claim that some rural area's infrastructure needs a million dollar upgrade.
 
I assume because if it's wet it conducts electricity. They probably could have hit the same speeds using coat hangers.
 
Isn't a wet string a really shitty wire? It's conductive but not as conductive as copper.
 
Do you wrap it around your wi-fi antenna, or cram it in your ethernet port?
 
DukenukemX said:
Isn't a wet string a really shitty wire? It's conductive but not as conductive as copper.
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In terms of DC current, a wet string is a REALLY REALLY SHITTY WIRE. In terms of high frequency AC I'm not sure how much impedance it has.

If the water content in the string happens to be deionized then its basically an insulator.
 
Heck it is better than the 1.5Mb max I get on ATTs DSL where I live. Sad that wet string can outperform what ATT has only 5 miles from town.
 
captaindiptoad said:
its a joke guy, they arent....
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Yet, years ago, if you turned off the graphics from loading, you could still read the web pages text sections; for example, in the beginning of Amazon, you could even order stuff just using the text information when only that loaded and you had graphics turned off for speed purposes. As time went on, they converted the text into blocks of stuff which loaded only as a graphic. For example, buttons to click went from being a box with actual text in it, to a picture which read as back or next, and the picture being way larger the the former box.
Today, it seems like there's almost nothing being in text, and web pages are exponentially larger in size?
 
nightfly said:
Yet, years ago, if you turned off the graphics from loading, you could still read the web pages text sections; for example, in the beginning of Amazon, you could even order stuff just using the text information when only that loaded and you had graphics turned off for speed purposes. As time went on, they converted the text into blocks of stuff which loaded only as a graphic. For example, buttons to click went from being a box with actual text in it, to a picture which read as back or next, and the picture being way larger the the former box.
Today, it seems like there's almost nothing being in text, and web pages are exponentially larger in size?
Click to expand...

This has bugged me for a long time now. Why should I need to load a picture just to read some text.

That coupled with the fact that websites now can't seem to host their own resources, having scripts that have to contact sometimes 15 other sites spread across the internet. Just use NoScript and see how many scripts run on a typical web page and how many different domains they are accessing. Just because the internet is faster now, why not make things load faster instead of at the same speed while spreading the incoming information all over the place.
 
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