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HeyBub[_3_]

wrote:
On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:11:41 -0600, "HeyBub"
wrote:

Stormin Mormon wrote:
The earlier decades of the USA, we had fairly close to free
market. I wasn't alive then, but I'm guessing it was better
off than now.

It's a moving target.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, an individual could not OWN a
telephone. Long distance calls were upwards of a dollar a minute and
that was when a dollar was real money. When telephone modems first
came out, they were limited to 27,000bps because not everybody had
hard-wired lines that could support the higher speeds and it
wouldn't be "fair" for city dwellers to have better service than
those who got their POTS via a strand of barbed-wire.

Eventually the government got out of (most of) the telephone
regulation business. Only because of inertia has the government been
slow to react to the internet, but the FCC has bestirred itself with
new rules on "net neutrality" (in the interests of "fairness" for
the unwashed).

Bub, you must be young. The original modems were 300 BPS
As late as the 80s, the standard business modem was 1200 or 2400 BPS
and the 9600 BPS modem was leased line only.

I wish I was young. An actual federal regulation prohibited modems from
working at the speeds over (if I remember) 56K.

Even today, most modems operate at 2400 BPS. And there are millions of them.
(Think ATM machines).