The irony here being that 3.5Mb/s is still faster than some domestic broadband here in Britain...
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 …
COMMENTS
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Friday 15th December 2017 10:18 GMT PM from Hell
Wet Aluminium & FTTV
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)
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 22:12 GMT StargateSg7
Re: ADSL slow? Shurely not!
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?
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 22:29 GMT Griffo
Re: ADSL slow? Shurely not!
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
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Friday 15th December 2017 01:50 GMT StargateSg7
Re: ADSL slow? Shurely not!
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.
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Thursday 14th December 2017 15:42 GMT The_Idiot
Re: ADSL slow? Shurely not!
@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...
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 13:50 GMT My other car is an IAV Stryker
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.)
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 13:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If the engineer has a quiet moment...
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.
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 13:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If the engineer has a quiet moment...
@ 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.
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Thursday 14th December 2017 09:05 GMT Adam 52
Re: If the engineer has a quiet moment...
"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.
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 15:39 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: If the engineer has a quiet moment...
"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.
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 15:52 GMT Gnomalarta
Re: If the engineer has a quiet moment...
"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/
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Wednesday 13th December 2017 19:45 GMT Swiss Anton
Re: Caffeine high?
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.
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