Data Pipe-Flow & Download-Time Converter

1840s — The telegraph baud. Samuel Morse's 1844 telegraph between Washington and Baltimore was the first electrical signalling network. Manual operators sent 5-10 words per minute (about 25 bps in modern terms). Baudot in 1874 introduced the 5-bit code that named the "baud" (symbols per second). By 1900 commercial telegraphy reached 100 baud over single-pair copper; transatlantic submarine cables delivered 8 wpm (under 5 bps) at colossal expense - signalling was the bottleneck of 19th-century commerce.

1958-1979 — The first modems. The Bell 101 modem (1958) ran 110 bps over a leased line for SAGE air-defence. Bell 103 (1962) brought 300 bps to public dial-up. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published TCP/IP in 1974. The Hayes Smartmodem (1981) standardised the AT command set; 1200 baud (V.22) arrived in 1980, 2400 baud (V.22bis) in 1984. CompuServe and The Source (1979-80) ran the first commercial dial-up information services. The 300-2400 baud era defined the BBS culture.

1980s — T-carrier and ISDN. AT&T deployed T1 (1.544 Mbps) carriers commercially through the early 80s, originally for inter-office trunking. Businesses began leasing T1 in 1983 for $5000+/month - effectively pioneering corporate WANs. ISDN BRI (128 kbps) launched in 1986, the first all-digital local loop, though uptake was slow due to cost. T3 (44.736 Mbps) became the backbone trunk standard. By 1990 the AT&T long-distance backbone ran on coast-to-coast T3 routes.

1990s — Dial-up modem era + DSL. V.32bis (1991) brought 14.4 kbps; V.34 (1994) 28.8/33.6 kbps. AOL ascended to 30 million subscribers on 28.8/56k. The 56k V.90 (1998) hit the PSTN's 8 kHz analog ceiling. ADSL (1995, commercial 1998) transformed copper local loops: 1.5 Mbps downstream over the same telephone wire. By 2000 millions of homes were on ADSL, ushering in always-on internet. Cable modems (DOCSIS 1.0, 1997) competed at similar speeds.

2000s — Ethernet at home, fiber to the prem. 100BASE-TX (1995) and 1000BASE-T (1999) made gigabit Ethernet cheap by 2005. SONET OC-192 (10 Gbps) lit the long-haul. Japan's NTT launched FTTH service in 2001; Verizon FiOS in 2004 (15 Mbps), AT&T U-verse in 2006. Wi-Fi 802.11g (54 Mbps, 2003) and 802.11n (600 Mbps, 2009) replaced wired LAN at home. Smartphones (iPhone 2007) drove cellular: HSPA hit 21 Mbps in 2008, LTE in 2010 launched at 100 Mbps peak.

2010s — LTE, fiber gigabit, 100/400G. LTE-Advanced (2013) reached 1 Gbps peak via carrier aggregation. Google Fiber (2012) brought 1 Gbps symmetric to home users at $70/mo, disrupting incumbent ISPs. 100GbE ethernet (IEEE 802.3ba, 2010) and 400GbE (802.3bs, 2017) reshaped the datacenter. 5G NR Release 15 (2018) launched with sub-6 GHz mid-band and mmWave; theoretical peak 20 Gbps. PCIe 4.0 (2017) doubled internal bus speeds; Thunderbolt 3 (2015) brought 40 Gbps to laptops.

2020-2026 — Gigabit normal, terabit infrastructure. By 2026: ~70% of OECD households have fiber gigabit or higher; XGS-PON 10 Gbps tiers cost $100/mo in major metros. Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be, 2024) opens 6 GHz with 46 Gbps PHY. Thunderbolt 5 and USB4 v2 deliver 80 Gbps over USB-C. 5G Advanced and early 6G research push mmWave toward 100 Gbps peak. Datacenter spines run 800GbE in production; 1.6 TbE samples ship in 2026. Submarine cable capacity has hit 224 Tbps per system. The 100-year journey from 25 bps Morse to 100 Gbps mmWave is roughly 12 orders of magnitude - a tripling every 3 years for a century.