Forget rolling out optic fibres to your home: String is the technology of the future!
Engineers at a small British internet service provider have successfully made a broadband [ADSL] connection work over 2m (6ft 7in) of wet string. The connection reached speeds of 3.5Mbps (megabits per second), according to the Andrews and Arnold engineer who conducted the experiment.
The point of the experiment appears to have been purely to see if it was achievable.
The string used in the experiment was first put in salty water - chosen because salt is a good conductor of electricity.
Prof Jim Al-Khalili from Surrey University's department of physics explained how it worked: "Although wet string is clearly not as good a conductor of electricity as copper wire, it's not really about the flow of current. Here the string is acting as a waveguide to transmit an electromagnetic wave. And because the broadband signal in this case is very high frequency it doesn't matter so much what the material is."
(Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Thursday December 14 2017, @05:20AM
no one tell the Australian Government..
If it gets out that *string* is better than some of our coax cable connections, we might just get upset enough to whinge on the internet.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-17/nbn-users-key-complaints-centre-around-slow-speeds,-drop-outs/8031356\ [abc.net.au]
http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/nbn/nbns-constipation-problems-go-much-deeper-than-a-lack-of-fibre/news-story/b82532222d97fa2fb338dbd23d437f50 [news.com.au]
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/accc-acts-on-nbn-internet-speed-complaints/news-story/f4621c330652c30f6ffeffbda47945c2 [theaustralian.com.au]
http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/speed-check-what-nbn-speed-promises-really-mean-20130802-hv180.html [smh.com.au]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex