he Internet began as a network funded
by the us
government to support projects within the government and at universities
and research laboratories in the US - but grew over time to include most of the
world's large universities and the research arms of many technology companies.
Use by a wider audience only came in 1995 when restrictions on the use of the
Internet to carry commercial traffic were lifted.
In the early to mid-1980s, most
Internet access was from pc and workstations directly connected to local area
networks or from dial-up connections using modems and analog telephon lins. LANs
typically operated at 10 Mbit/s and grew to support 100 and 1000 Mbit/s, while
modem data rates grew from 1200 and 2400 bit/s in the 1980s, to 28 and 56
kbit/s by the mid to late 1990s. Initially dial-up connections were made from terminals
or computers running terminal emulation software to terminal servers on LANs.
These dial-up connections did not support end-to-end use of the Internet
protocols and only provided terminal to host connections. The introduction of network
access servers (NASs) supporting the serial line internet protocol (SLIP) and
later the point to point protocol (PPP) extended the Internet protocols and
made the full range of Internet services available to dial-up users, subject
only to limitations imposed by the lower data rates available using dial-up.
Broadband Internet access, often
shortened to just broadband and also known as high-speed Internet access, are
services that provide bit-rates considerably higher than that available using a56kbits
modems . In the U.S. national broadband connection of 2009, the fedral connection communication (FCC) defined broadband access as
"Internet access that is always on and faster than the traditional dial-up
access",[7] although the FCC has defined it
differently through the years.[ The term broadband was originally a reference
to multi-frequency communication, as opposed to narrow band or baseband . Broadband is now a marketing term that
telephone, cable, and other companies use to sell their more expensive higher
data rate products.[
Most broadband services provide a
continuous "always on" connection; there is no dial-in process
required, and it does not “hog” phone lines. Broadband provides improved access
to Internet services such as:
- Faster www browsing
- Faster downloading of documents, photographs, videos,
and other large files
- Telephony ,video conferencing , and videoconferencing
- vpn and
remote system administration
- Online gaming , especially massively multiplayer online role-playing games
which are interaction-intensive
In the 1990s, the nationala
information infrastructure initiative in the U.S. made broadband Internet
access a public policy issue.] In 2000, most Internet access to homes
was provided using dial-up, while many businesses and schools were using
broadband connections. In 2000 there were just under 150 million dial-up
subscriptions in the 34 OECD countries[ and fewer than 20 million broadband
subscriptions. By 2004, broadband had grown and dial-up had declined so that
the number of subscriptions were roughly equal at 130 million each. In 2010, in
the OECD countries, over 90% of the Internet access subscriptions used
broadband, broadband had grown to more than 300 million subscriptions, and
dial-up subscriptions had declined to fewer than 30 million.
