Comment by hermitdev

64kbps was a limitation of old analog phone lines, which were pretty noisy and also also operated at a pretty low frequency (they only allowed up to a certain frequency, anything beyond was clipped on old analog lines). In practice, dont know that I saw anything beyond 56k. And you could only get that on a clean line, near a switching station. My self, not sure I ever saw much beyond 48k, maybe occasionally 52k, but dont think I ever saw a dialup connection hit the full 56k.

Higher speeds werent possible until moving to digital lines (64k for IDSN, single line, 128k for dual). DSL upped the anty, pushing to 1-3 Mbps in my area. Cable really pushed it when I could get 15 Mbps vs best available DSL in my area at around 3 Mbps.

Today, I have around 200 Mbps over cable (gigabit is available), best DSL in the area is still around 25 Mbps. Fiber is not available yet, but AT&T is running fiber, but 2 years in, still not an option and they haven't published pricing/speeds for the area.