Ethernet over barbed wire

http://www.sigcon.com/Pubs/edn/SoGoodBarbedWire.htm

by provost • 9 years ago

183 53 9 years ago

sigcon.com

j_s• 9 years ago

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15909261

on (somewhat?) related front page discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107 (ADSL over wet string)

also linked there: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...

sonium• 9 years ago

People might find it intersting to know that in the car industry Gigabit Ethernet over unshielded twisted pair is common [1] since it allows to shave off some cents on extra copper.

[1] http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID...

wereHamster• 9 years ago

Why would not having shielding save copper? Shielding is usually made out of a metal foil or mesh, often aluminium. I've never seen shielding out of copper.

daniel-cussen• 9 years ago

The NSA (read money is no object) has copper in the windows of its main building to shield them from TEMPEST style hacking.

fisherjeff• 9 years ago

I think the copper savings in 1000BASE-T1 come from running GigE over a single pair versus the more-typical 4.

bsder3• 9 years ago

Has this become standardized yet? I've got a bunch of multi-drop CAN stuff that I would LOVE to move over to single pair ethernet with multi-drop a la 10BASE2. Unfortunately I haven't see a 10BASE2 compatible PHY in 20+ years.

IEEE had a working group on this but I hadn't seen any actually shipping chips that mortals could get their hands on.

(Edit: Apparently still vapor. Still can't find a source for the Marvell 88Q1010 & 88Q2112.)

(Edit: Only thing available seems to be this which is almost certainly some gigantic FPGA solution ... https://beyondstandards.ieee.org/connected-vehicles/intrepid...)

voxadam2• 9 years ago

What are your bandwidth and latency requirement? More than once I've pondered 6LoWPAN over RS485 using token passing.

zbrozek• 9 years ago

If you're OK with 100 mbps point-to-point over a single wire pair, there's stuff like the TJA1100[1].

10Base-T1 might be a real thing someday. You might just want RS-485.

[1] https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/TJA1100.pdf

matthberg• 9 years ago

Needs a (2001) tag, but fascinating demonstration with get marketing.

slinkyavenger• 9 years ago

It's a nice callback to early phone infrastructure, which leveraged barbed-wire fences to bring service to those who lived in rural areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire_telephone_lines

mschuster912• 9 years ago

Hmm. For whatever reason this did not show up when I posted my own comment... I'm impressed one can run Ethernet over barbed wire.

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

Well ethernet didn't start over twisted pair. It started over thick coax. Something that is not that far from setting up a couple of radios.

Now you are more likely to get the minimum speed this way (1MB?) than the GB stuff some of us have come accustomed too.

cellularmitosis• 9 years ago

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why the phone system standardized on 48 volts. With DC, you need to get above about 60 volts to have any chance of lethality. If someone were to grab the barbed wire, they'd get a jolt, but it wouldn't kill them.

amigoingtodie• 9 years ago

I believe current is a more prevelant factor in electrocution.

[edit] Found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_and_ring#Line_voltage

Johnythree• 9 years ago

No. These early phone systems were "Magneto", not the modern "Central battery" (CB).

Each subscriber had their own batteries (No. 6 cells), so there was no DC on the line.

There was Ring Current of course, but that has always been well above 50 Volts.

omg_ketchup• 9 years ago

Who needs https when you have barbed wire?

StavrosK2• 9 years ago

Everyone? It's trivial to tap barbed wire.

mschuster912• 9 years ago

Can I run this on a farm?

Seriously, this reminds me about the stories I read on HN about how early telephone networks were established by farmers (ab)using their electric fencing for communication.

digi_owl2• 9 years ago

No surprise there, as analog phones are basically two lines of telegraph wire.

himom• 9 years ago

It would be neat to have a mesh topology that uses the bandwidth and redundancy of multiple fence paths in order to prevent an outage from damage to any one particular fence. Solar-powered routers anyone?

Otherwise: Dabnabbit Maude, the cows gone loose again because we lost the interwebs. (I’m half-Texan so it’s not -ist.)

Bartweiss3• 9 years ago

Bizarrely, that's close to a real problem! Ethernet over barbed wire may have been just for show, but phone service over it was a very real approach.

Perhaps not "the internet released the cows", but at least "the stampede cut the phone lines".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wire_telephone_lines

dogma1138• 9 years ago

Too bad there are sanctions against North Korea, it seems like this would be a perfect fit for Kwangmyong[1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_(network)

ringaroundthetx• 9 years ago

sanctions have no power here

Blockchain networks have no capability of this concept

ryacko• 9 years ago

Patent law doesn't work against a sovereign state.

So yes, they probably violate the GPL.

frik• 9 years ago

In 1998, Wide-Band Systems demonstrates Gigabit Ethernet running on four pairs of old, rusty barbed wire.

Yet in 2017 we still have only 1Gbit Ethernet in LANs :(

1Gbps = 125 MB/s !!

I am running 1Gbit since 2003 at home. And all f..king home network devices still support only 1Gbit Ethernet. It's not fast enough. When can some network company finally release 10Gbit or 100Gbit Ethernet (copper or fiber) for cheap home usage.

krylon• 9 years ago

I feel for you, but I think if you need a 10GBit or 100GBit network at home, your needs are a little extreme.

My home network still runs on 100MBit, because of a stubborn old switch that refuses to die. By now, my curiosity to see how long this thing will last (it is about 13.5 years old) outweighs my impatience when pushing large files around. ;-)

stordoff2• 9 years ago

Definitely on the high end, but having centralised most of my storage (backups, media etc.) to a NAS, 10Gbps would definitely be welcome. Pushing large backups to my NAS is time-consuming, and e.g. video editing basically requires pulling it down to a local drive first (not to say it'd be ideal to use a network store for that at all, but it'd be more viable).

lucaspiller• 9 years ago

Used enterprise hardware that supports 10Gbit isn’t that expensive. For the average home user even gigabit is overkill, which is why 90%+ of people just use whatever WiFi router their ISP provides.

randomerr• 9 years ago

Are there modules I can experiment with?

pjc50• 9 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean, you can just splice your barbed wire into Ethernet cable and plug it into regular transcievers that you already have.

throwaway413• 9 years ago

Talk about a secure connection.

Ethernet over barbed wire

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