Word: kbps
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week I decided to see how well they answered the call. I had planned to upgrade my old 28.8-kbps modem anyway, so I tried Actiontec's $130 56K call-waiting modem first. After a painless setup, I was online and ready for calls. This particular night, unfortunately, there didn't happen to be any. I finally had to call myself, using my roommate's phone line. I was startled when the ringing came from the modem, not the phone. But I could still answer my phone and have a scintillating conversation with myself before hanging up and getting...
...picture of one in an ad. It is so adorable. The modem is built into one of those PCMCIA cards that fit into a credit-card-size slot on a laptop computer; a teeny, 2-in. antenna--so cute!--pops up to send and receive data at 19.2 kbps. That's a fairly pedestrian speed, but if it meant I could do e-mail and even browse the Web while riding the Long Island Rail Road, I'd happily put up with it. Imagine all the cool things I could do, unbound from the desktop...
...about its next-generation modem, which will abandon Seedy Petey for gsm, a cellular standard that handles data far better--and faster. That GSM-compatible Merlin, which the company expects to start selling in the middle of next year, will supposedly send and receive data at Mercury-fast 144 kbps, even from a train. I bet it'll be cute...
...cable-free future. AirCard's advantage is that it automatically connects to a digital cellular network--or even a LAN--when you boot up, and it has a funky-looking antenna as well. The only catch: cellular can't operate at speeds faster than a tortoise-like 19.2 kbps. For now, the wireless experience is strictly for low-intensity surfers...
...network, the 6-oz. phone works in 48 countries, from Iceland to Indonesia, and bills international calls at $1 to $2 a minute. A built-in infrared modem lets you send e-mail wirelessly from one of the many notebook computers equipped with an infrared port. The glacial 9.6-kbps transmission rate, however, billed by the minute, can be a drag...