Wet rope achieves broadband speed of 3.5Mbps

It reads like an April's Fools Day joke, but apparently a couple of bored engineers at Andrews and Arnold decided to check what kind of broadband speed you can achieve over 2 meters of wet string. Workers at the small British ISP put a piece of rope in salty water to make it conductive and ran some tests, just or the fun of it.

The result is pretty impressive, they were able to achieve a connection speed of 3.5Mbps! These days that's not very high, but I can still remember the day when a cutting-edge broadband connection had a downlink of just 10Mbps. Andrews and Arnold director Adrian Kennard says the result shows how adaptive ADSL really is:

"To be honest it was a bit of fun, which one of our techies decided to try out - we have equipment we could test in the office, and why not?" Adrian Kennard, the internet provider's director, told the BBC.

"There is no commercial potential that we are aware of."

"What it does show, though, is how adaptive ADSL really is. This can be important when it comes to faulty lines with bad (or even disconnected) joints still providing some level of broadband service."

Prof Jim Al-Khalili from the University of Surrey's department of physics explains it works because it's not really about the flow of current but about acting as a waveguide to transmit an electromagnetic wave:

"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."

H/T: BBC News