Whether it's phone wire used for dial-up and digital subscriber lines (DSL), or the coaxial cables that carry cable modem connections, these connections are a bottleneck between the carrier's big pipes and your bandwidth-starved computer.
Main.net's gear already serves 10, 000 European homes at speeds of 500 kilobits a second, roughly equal to average cable and digital subscriber line (DSL) speeds, but a tenfold increase over standard dial-up modems.