There is a procedure that the SEC can use to nail Neldon Johnson in court, and prove that DWM does not work as claimed, i.e., providing 6,000,000 bps over an unmodified conventional phone line.
To do it, I would suggest that they contact another federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (http://www.nist.gov/), formerly known as the National Bureau of Standards, who probably have the necessary expertise and equipment, or know who does. Other federal agencies that come to mind include the FCC, NTIA (part of the Commerce Dept.), or DISA (part of the Defense Dept.)
The procedure would basically be something like this:
(1) Set up at least 2 "POTS" (plain old telephone service) lines outside of IAUS, to prevent them from cheating. Use standard DS0 phone lines, that have a 4 KHz analog bandwidth and a 64,000 bps analog-to-digital conversion. This is what the vast majority of phone lines in America use right now.
(2) Acquire at least 2 DWM modems (if they exist), plus BERT (bit error rate test) equipment (such as TTC's FireBERDs) and protocol analyzers.
(3) Perform file transfers using a known protocol, with a known number of overhead bytes per packet. Be sure to use data that is already in a compressed format, such as ZIP archives or JPEG pictures. (A certain modem manufacturer used to claim that they could do double the line speed, because they compressed the data in the modem -- this does not work with data that is already compressed!)
(4) Measure the true data throughput in bps (bits per second). With modern data communications protocols, if you lose or corrupt just 1 bit in a packet of data, the whole packet has to be retransmitted. This can greatly reduce your actual data throughput. A packet of data has a number of bytes of overhead, plus actual data. For example, if a packet has 48 bytes of overhead + 512 bytes of data, you have (48 + 512) * 8 bits/byte of data, or 4480 bits per packet.
(5) Because of bit-stealing (where the phone company equipment occasionally steals the least significant bits of data, an audio bandwidth that is closer to 3.4 to 3.7 KHz, and other factors, you will not be able to get more than 56,000 bps (56 Kbps). Wait a minute... that's already been done! I can go to my local MicroCenter, Fry's, CompUSA, etc. and choose from a variety of 56 Kbps modems.
Yes, it is possible to get higher speeds over copper phone lines, -but- (critical point here), the equipment has to be changed at the phone company side. That's how higher speed technologies like ISDN or ADSL work - the phone company has to change their equipment. |
