Why was DSL not used in the early days of the internet? Did the technology require faster chips that weren’t available at the time?
In: Technology
Any electrical signal traveling through a line can be analyzed as a bunch of different frequencies. Back in the 1800’s, the phone system was originally only designed to carry frequencies corresponding to the sounds humans could hear.
DSL uses extra high frequencies that are too high for humans to hear. This is fantastic because it means it can use the old-fashioned telephone lines, *but* high frequencies die out over shorter distances, meaning a telco that wants to enable DSL has to place its facility closer to the user than before. So the telephone company has to change its entire network to support DSL.
Keep in mind that during the dialup era there were a lot of things different than today. Two most important factors are this:
– The Internet (and computers) were still very new. Most people had *no Internet or Internet-capable devices* before 1995 or so. Why upgrade the network with data services that would only be used by maybe 5% of customers?
– Dialup modems were slow. The phone lines only supported 56 kbits / second, but modems weren’t able to achieve 56k speeds until the late 1990’s. Who would buy DSL when a regular phone line sufficed?
Basically DSL appeared after the Internet became popular, dialup hit a speed wall due to the limits of the analog phone system, and the telcos had enough time to physically build new network facilities.
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