With broadband connections of up to 24Mbps on the horizon (A need for speed, September 8), is there any likelihood of the standard 56k modem being improved? Richard Finch
Sorry, no: not in the near future, or ever. There is a theoretical limit to how much information can be sent over an analogue telephone line, and it is about 33.6 kilobits per second (kbps). So-called 56k modems depend on using a digital telephone exchange to achieve speeds of 48kbps to 52kbps, and hardly anyone ever gets the maximum speed of 56kbps. Essentially, the communication speed is limited by the amount of noise on the line, as shown by Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, in 1948.
