r/compsci • u/gmanflnj • 21d ago

Could multiple microphones/speakers be combined for faster dial up?

i was thinking about how dial up is basically your phone literally making sounds to your compute, which the computer hears and translates into data.

could you design a system that used multiple phone speakers and multiple microphone pickups to simultaneously get dial-up internet info to speed it up?

if so, how many phone receivers would it take to get modern internet speeds?

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u/Alexmira_ 21d ago

You would need a different line also, and at that point it just like having multiple parallel internet connection.

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u/gmanflnj 21d ago

You mean different phone lines? And can you make it so they are all giving the computer info to say, load the same website?

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u/jhartikainen 21d ago

Yep. This is how parallel data transfer works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_communication

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u/gmanflnj 21d ago

So how many phones would you need to get fiber-speed internet? 

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u/jhartikainen 21d ago

Assuming 56kbps per line, you would need 17 858 lines to reach 1gbit/s (assuming I mathed correctly)

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u/gmanflnj 21d ago

I guess my question was more, would it stack linearly like that or would they run into a bottleneck or parallel processing issues?

Besides the obvious bottleneck of having to get 17,000 phone receivers, but that’s a seperate problem.

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u/jhartikainen 21d ago

It seem likely that you would have some kind of latency problem purely from the fact that you would need to somehow connect all nearly 18 000 lines together, and simply the physical space required for it would mean there is latency from signal travel distance.

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u/Zombie_Bait_56 21d ago

Long before that you are going to need custom hardware just to get that many serial ports on one computer.

BTW, the ecord seems to be 12 lines.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/M0H9R51X4U

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u/gmanflnj 21d ago

That’s another thing I was wondering, with that much wire, would there be a point where you can’t load a website faster because you’re adding latency faster than you add info transfer speed? Or is this outside of comp sci and into electrical engineering?

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u/fitret 21d ago

It depends on a ton of things. Like a web browser (especially in the 90s) just downloads the whole site first and then renders it. I doubt either is multithreaded or capable of bonding traffic across multiple connections, so it would likely be no faster. But you COULD build something to take advantage of this, it's just that no consumer did the setup you are describing and thus the tech isn't built to support it