Can ADSL survive an acoustic coupler? To give it a fair shot, assume the driver and microphone are studio quality rather than the kind you’d find on a 1970s telephone handset. I bet it’d work pretty well. But the real question would then be: how much of an air gap could you create and still get a connection? Could you post to HN on an ADSL signal that’s being screamed across the length of the room you’re sitting in?
ADSL upstream starts at 25kHz, downstream at >120kHz. So probably not. Purpose-designed ultrasonic hardware might be able to.
Or an acoustic coupler which also acts a little like an electrical coupler at higher frequencies because it has no electrical shielding...
Our homes' water supplies are untapped options for data connectivity.
joking aside, I remember a while back that there has at least been cursory investigation into running high-speed internet cables through water pipes. Presuming you have water pipes to your property, could be easier than digging up roads etc. Only issue might be if you have a leak and need to shut off your water!! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/09/uk-launch...
There is company in Czechia which provides optics via sewage. I guess it is cheaper to use existing infrastructure than to place new pipes under roads.
ADSL, being essentially a form of alternating current, will pass through an air gap. I was enlightened on this by an AT&T tech who pointed out that one of my ADSL lines had several breaks and could not carry DC but the ADSL signal still came through. The other line was dead so I was running essentially on one wire with an earth ground. Here is an interesting discussion: "Phone line with 1 broken wire still gets ADSL2…
In some sense, that's "just" radio. An antenna is a wire... it's sending a signal and picking it up from a very nearby antenna. Radio transmissions are all AC.
(Arguably, the real insight here is that the very existence of radio is impressive / unintuitive.)
ADSL, being essentially a form of alternating current, will pass through an air gap. I was enlightened on this by an AT&T tech who pointed out that one of my ADSL lines had several breaks and could not carry DC but the ADSL signal still came through. The other line was dead so I was running essentially on one wire with an earth ground. Here is an interesting discussion: "Phone line with 1 broken wire still gets ADSL2…
> Anyway, my hat is off to the people who designed and implemented ADSL.
It's a blessing-and-a-curse: too many incumbent ISPs in highly-developed nations used ADSL's ability to run on anything as an excuse to put-off FTTH deployments (looking at you, BT).
Our homes' water supplies are untapped options for data connectivity.
joking aside, I remember a while back that there has at least been cursory investigation into running high-speed internet cables through water pipes. Presuming you have water pipes to your property, could be easier than digging up roads etc. Only issue might be if you have a leak and need to shut off your water!! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/09/uk-launch...
> I remember a while back that there has at least been cursory investigation into running high-speed internet cables through water pipes.
I had a bonded DSL line for a while when I lived in the Bay Area with service coming from two different twisted pair lines. One line was consistently ~18Mbps, the other barely 3-5. It was pretty clear that one of the pairs was good and the other was broken somewhere alone the way. The lines were all in a bundle, with no way to discern what was what any individual strand was in the bundle (or which was broken or short…
You can do time domain reflectometry to find out where the breaks, sharp corners and reflections are in the cable. Some modems have special debug modes in that can do this too - then you get to know exactly how many meters along the wire the break is. When you get close, you can hook a resistor to the line and rerun the test and it'll tell you how many meters forward or back you need to go to find the issue. Pretty e…
Yeah, this was in a neighborhood bundle with many… many lines together. No one was going to dig into that to find which line a mouse or squirrel had chewed the insulation off of. I remember running a few diagnostics, but as it was “working”, no one was going to try to fix it. The ISP couldn’t even convince ATT to move the bad line to a different pair. Which was sad. I was supposed to be in the 40Mbps range, but could only get ~18-20. Also — this was enough bandwidth for us at the time, so I just ran off of the single line and was good. Given some of the dsl horror stories, we weren’t too and off.
There used to be a debate about going All-in on GPON or doing FTTX with G.Fast. Now G.Fast is pretty much dead or niche at this point. The end of DSL era. While DOCSIS is still doing well in many places. The next step would be to mandate fibre cables in all new housing. Along with ONT and Router in one solution.
Better regulation around marketing would go a long ways to begin with. In the UK "fiber" is used as a catch-all term for any kind of internet connection even though in the majority of cases it's just fiber up to a certain point and then either DSL or coax, making it hard for consumers to tell exactly what they're signing up for. Same for bullshit terms such a "superfast" or "ultrafast" instead of actual up/down/latency numbers.