Widband telephone lines and faster dial-up connections

Normal telephone lines have a bandwidth of something like 300Hz to 3,500Hz. This may have something to do with the technological constraints of the time that the public switched telephone network was implemented. Apparently, this limits dial-up connection to bulletin board system and the internet to 56kb/s.
If telephone lines were later upgraded to have a bandwidth as wide as 80Hz to 14kHz, or even 20Hz to 20kHz then faster dial-up would be possible.
 

nbcman

Donor
Why use dial-up instead of DSL as OTL? There is no need for extra wiring to the end users-just a splitter / filter and a modem.
 
But Digital subscriber line didn't exist back in the 1990s. Also, dial up seems to have been the only way to connect to non-internet bulletin board systems.
 

nbcman

Donor
But Digital subscriber line didn't exist back in the 1990s. Also, dial up seems to have been the only way to connect to non-internet bulletin board systems.
There was no 'internet' to speak of in the early 1990s. You are in the chicken - egg situation. The few computer users at that time trying to access the proto-internet with their Intel 386 PCs-or if you were a power user you had a 486-don't need a better bandwidth. Also, the cost and complexity of computers back in the early 1990s kept most users away. The first PC which I bought was a 'high-end' 386 with a 40 MB hard drive that I bought in 1993 cost over $2000-or or over $3500 today.
 
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There was no 'internet' to speak of in the early 1990s. You are in the chicken - egg situation. The few computer users at that time trying to access the proto-internet with their Intel 386 PCs-or if you were a power user you had a 486-don't need a better bandwidth. Also, the cost and complexity of computers back in the early 1990s kept most users away. The first PC which I bought was a 'high-end' 386 with a 40 MB hard drive that I bought in 1993 cost over $2000-or or over $3500 today.

I had internet in the mid-1990s and the dial-up noises still ring in my head as the opening theme to the internet. But I do think that wideband telephone lines could have had advantages for fax.
 
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