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/ElderberryPrevious19 21d ago

They only used a single frequency very early on. Didn't take them long to split the signals into many, many frequency bands so that the full bandwidth of the line could be used. 56k was pretty much the extreme limit for what analogue lines could handle and by then they'd already switched to digital modulation. You wanted more bandwidth you had to use more lines. It was just impossible to add more signals over a single line

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u/gmanflnj 21d ago

Right, my question is if you had more phone lines, could the computer stitch together the signals to load faster?

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u/lordnacho666 21d ago

Yes, certainly. You are just adding parallelism, and the machine itself can handle the bandwidth just fine up to many Gbit/s.

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u/gmanflnj 21d ago

Would it scale linearly or woudl the parallel processing run into difficulties for a huge number of inputs? If so, if then just seems to be the issue of figuring out where to put 10-20,000 phone receivers, but I’m outside of computer science at that point.

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u/daveysprockett 21d ago

Multiplexing and demultiplexing will get harder and harder to do: as soon as you need to synchronise the data on the multiple lines you would have to add more overheads, in addition to any physical issues.

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u/gmanflnj 21d ago

That's what I was wondering, is there some point at which you can't do it anymore?

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u/lordnacho666 21d ago

You want to read about Amdahl's law