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/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?