First, there are 50 million U.S. homes linked to the Internet today, and 48 million of them have slow dial-up modems.
It allows for connections at about the speed of current dial-up modems, several times faster than the 9.6 or 14.4 kilobits per second now available.
While Dash has done a good job of keeping the overall system responsive, it can't completely hide the effective difference between broadband and early dial-up modems.
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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.
At a time when the conventional wisdom says that traditional desktop software categories word processing, anti-virus, personal finance are going the way of dial-up modems on account of Google-style Web services, Intel is making its biggest acquisition ever with a company deeply rooted in the world of traditional Windows computing.
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But 2.5G systems still transfer data at more than twice the rate of dial-up Internet modems found in homes.
Right now the company relies on dial-up ISDN and 56K bps modems for most of its Internet access.
The technology, called DSL, already exists to allow internet connections up to 100 times faster than existing modems, and BT has been testing it for some time.
The FastBreak network, which Sprint calls an integrated on-demand network or ION, will let users access the Internet at speeds up to 100 times faster than traditional modems.
He says those on-ramps have gotten better in the last decade, as cable and DSL modems have replaced slower dial-up connections.
What's more, current Clearwire subscribers will have the opportunity to sign up for satellite TV delivered right to their modems -- an American first, as far as we know.
The speed would be up to 20 times faster than high-speed modems using regular phone lines.
This percentage is dipping a bit in 2012 as LTE external modems and media tablets with embedded LTE modules pick up, but LTE handsets will surpass 80-percent of device shipments during 2016.
ENGADGET: ABI Research: LTE subscriptions surpassed WiMAX usage in Q2 2012
The Openworld connection works up to 10 times faster than the 56.6 kilobits per second possible with the best modems currently on the market.
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