Modern technology:

When modems were young (a long time ago), they were used in teleprinter circuits at the sedate speed of 45.45 signals (also called elements or pulses) per second. One element per second is one baud (based on the old 5-unit digital Baudot code) and may consist of several bits of data. The Baudot code was replaced by the ASCII code many years ago.The low speeds of these early modems sufficed for many years – until these devices came to be required for linking other machines such as computers or computers and telephone exchanges. Owing to these different demands, over the past ten years or so, the speed of modems has been raised and raised again, but now, owing to the limitations of the analogue sections of the telephone network, the limit of 33.6/56 kbit/s seems to have been reached. But is this really so?