Initially, it was believed that ordinary phone lines could only be used at modest speeds, usually less than 9600 bits per second. In the 1950s, ordinary twisted-pair telephone cable often carried 4 MHz television signals between st… See more

Telephones are connected to the telephone exchange via a local loop, which is a physical pair of wires. The local loop was originally intended mostly for the transmission of speech, encompassing an audio frequ… See more

On the customer side, a DSL modem is hooked up to a phone line. The telephone company connects the other end of the line to a DSLAM, which concentrates a large number of individual DSL connections into a single bo… See more