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posted by mrpg on Thursday December 14 2017, @03:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the next-material-liver-tissue dept.

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."


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 14 2017, @10:50AM (1 child)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday December 14 2017, @10:50AM (#609646) Journal

    We need a fallback for connectivity that doesn't rely on a government or corporation, who can and will take it away. I've been thinking quantum entanglement would be best, but wet string? OK, sure, but let's hope there aren't birds around hunting for nest-building material.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @04:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @04:01PM (#609725)

    I see that string theory is finally gaining acceptance!