Telecom and Networking

Ancient “fake RJ-45″

Who invented that and decided that it was a good idea to start to use this 10 pin RJ-45 look-alike connector? I wanted to do measurement with multimeter on UTP wiring, took a cable (left) that looked like RJ-45, but nothing worked as planned with it. Ended up butchering a real CAT6 cable (on right)

Email is 50 years old

At some point this year, email turned 50 years old! In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first email using the SNDMSG program on ARPANET. 50 Years of Email https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/50-years-of-email-301262676.html But if the history of email tells us anything, it’s that email isn’t going away any time soon Email is 50 years old, and still where

Professional cable tracer details

I saw this cable tracer equipment in use few days ago connected to a telephone cable. Here is the device connected to the cable. Closer view of the device reveals code CTT45 type code and manufacturer name VESALA. It is a product made by a Finnish company VESALA. The CTT45 is the transmitter part of

Big Outage Day October 4, 2021

Monday October 2021 was an Internet outage day. Many Facebook users faced outage and felt they had “internjet” instead of Internet. Also ePanorama.net has few hours outage. ePanorama.net went down few hours earlier. When I got my server up, in few hours Facebook was able to get their site up. Interesting correlation, but correlation does

Usenet news

Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Basically format and transmission of Usenet articles is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages. Usenet started to operate at 1980 and I started using it in 1989. Users read and post messages

The Voices of Ethernet

Ethernet has risen to the top of the communications networking industry as a standard that dominates the data center down to the PC. Compatibility between old and new versions of Ethernet is legendary. The Ethernet Alliance has started an ongoing oral history, The Voices of Ethernet, in the form of video interviews of key players

Faked telephone ring tone

The Western Electric Model 500 and its subsequent variants were so ubiquitous that you almost couldn’t go anywhere without seeing one, especially in the United States. You have seen and heard this literal fixture of American life phone on countless of TV series and movies. Unfortunately many producers have been a little lazy and did

Ethernet over voltage protector

I got 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX Ethernet running through this over voltage protector. They are nor designed for faster data rate. Those protectors are designed to protect two 100 ohms wire pairs. They are designed to work well up to 60 MHz signal and have low capacitance (around 30 pF between wire pair wires). Links to