Word: modems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DIAL M FOR MODEM Last week AT&T unveiled 25 Internet pay phones at airports in New York, Atlanta and Dallas. The AT&T Public Phone 2000i has a 12-in. screen, a full-size keyboard and a touch pad. Internet access comes at a reasonable 25[cents] per minute (with a 4-min. minimum), and callers can talk and surf at the same time. No, you don't get your quarter back if you don't have any e-mail...
...airboard is not for everybody. At $1,065, it costs as much as a laptop but isn't meant for serious computing. Checking e-mail is easy, but a 56-kbps modem makes for pretty poky surfing. The touch panel is fine for sending quick messages, but pushing the on-screen buttons is tedious for anything longer. And it has a short leash: airboarders can drift only 30 m from the base station, a distance that may be fine for Japan's rabbit-hutch homes but is too weak for many rambling American houses...
...created a neat hack: it added a digital-signal processing chip that bypasses the operating system. You'll need to shell out $150 more for a 64 MB memory stick, though--the 8 MB stick included with the unit holds three songs max. And if you want a wireless modem, you'll have to wait until the end of the year...
...who’s really causing these new problems? A knee-jerk reaction would cast blame on those people who have four cell phones, two pagers, a fax line, a modem line and five phone lines in their house. Granted, it might be a bit excessive to have more phone numbers than limbs, but the real problem is that telephone companies waste the phone numbers that are allocated to them by an archaic blocking scheme, dating back more than six decades, that wastes numbers on sparsely-populated rural areas...
...example, a dial-up modem that connects to the Net over copper has a typical download speed of 56 kilobits--or 56,000 bits--per second, at which rate it would take nearly 10 minutes to download a three-minute song. By contrast, a modem connected to a TV cable that feeds into a fiber-optic loop could claim that tune in under a minute. Yet even today only about 6% of U.S. households have cable modems or digital subscriber lines, which carry compressed data over copper wires at broadband speed. But that hasn't stopped carriers from blanketing...