On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Juergen Specht wrote:
> Now that's funny...your "free" power source...your Telco!
> It even powers your, uhm, Keitai and other joy spending devices:
> http://www.sandman.com/telco.html
This is amusing, I have to say; I've not seen something so dodgy in
quite a while. Selling a $8.95 calculator for $69.95 just because you
added a little widget to let it use the battery current from your phone
line is quite a nice little profit-maker, though I'm sure the phone
company is not going to be too happy if a lot of people start doing
this.
Unfortunately, his technical information is, at best, somewhat out of date.
For example, this
The ideal level for a telephone line loop loss seems to be
about -5db. Local calls aren't too loud, and you can still hear
OK on intercity and long distance calls which have a lot of
loss compared to local calls.
might have been common in 1965, but even in tiny, remote towns of
a few hundred people in the wilds of British Columbia, BC Tel
replaced their electromechanical switches with modern electronic
ones more than five years ago. For most people, the local loop
(from the customer premises to the nearest telephone central office
at worst, or even the nearest channel bank or SLIC used for
multiplexing local loops) is the only analogue portion of the link.
Once your call gets to the CO or channel bank, it's digitized, and
your call is digital all the way to the other subscriber's CO,
whether that be on the same switch or across an ocean. Digital
calls don't suffer from any kind of loss, because a bit is the same
zero or one at -30 dB as it is at +5 dB.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Sun Dec 8 02:29:08 2002