I linked this to my dad (who's been a network engineer and CIO-type for nearly thirty years) and his response kind of floored me: "yeah, we did this with ARCNET. Brine-soaked twine." So, one, this is Older Than It Looks, and two, apparently my dad might be a wizard?
Years ago, I tried the same thing on ham radio - made an antenna from a piece of wet string and tried to call cq.<p>It worked a charm, though I had to continously wetten the string as I applied RF power to it.<p>(21MHz ground plane antenna; eased the top end of the string through a hole pierced in an empty beer can, suspended it from a tree and filled the can with salt water.<p>Losses were huge, so antenna was easy to tune. Not the best of radiators, though, but I did work twelve or thirteen countries with it.<p>Cost of string and beer - $4.<p>"Antenna this end is the proverbial piece of wet string - literally. Back to you." -Priceless.
For context, this is Adrian Kennard's blog. He's the CEO of AAISP (which I'd highly recommend for UK residents, they're extremely ethical and transparent; although I would not recommend their mobile service for different reasons).
I once had an issue where my phone line was completely dead, but I was still getting ADSL, just at very slow speeds. In the order of 1mbit.<p>After the technician came he told me that one of the two phone line wires had been broken off at the exchange.<p>In other words, there wasn't a complete electrical circuit.<p>The phone was dead but ADSL still works without even having a complete circuit.<p>I don't even understand how that can work at all.
Hot dogs are also conductive, since they are also filled with salt water. I wonder if you could do ADSL-over-hotdog. Obviously the length would be limited by the length of a frankfurter, so you wouldn't be able to get more than a foot or so, but it would be an interesting experiment.<p>A pickle might work too.
So, now that the concept has been proven, are we going to see a proper RFC proposal to standardize this? There's still 110 days left for submissions. That should be plenty of time to test what string types and electrolytes work best for various applications, to and improve the distance limit.
Perhaps some Australian NBN (National Broadband Network) customers would get improved speeds with wet string over their fibre to the node installations