Readers of a certain age will be haunted throughout their lives by a certain series of beeps, buzzes, blurs, and machine noises. It’s a far cry from the slick connections we’re used to today, but in fact our first connection to the World Wide Web was through a dial-up connection, which could reach speeds of up to 56.6 kb per second if you used a specific modem.
Finally, thanks to a rather special chip called the Amati Communications Overture ADSL chipset, we went beyond. Gone are the days of blazingly fast speeds where images took forever to load, we’re entering a new era with top speeds that are almost 2,000 times faster at 100 megabits per second. This paved the way for a new type of Internet filled with multimedia.
Digital Subscriber Line/Loop (DSL) is a technology that uses existing phone lines to transmit data over a modem to access the Internet, and many companies are developing competing standards for DSL. We owe everything to Amati Communications, a startup out of Stanford University, for the emergence of standards.
The chip that started the Internet boom
Amati Communications is one of many companies developing a new method of accessing the Internet, designing a DSL modulation method called discrete multitone (DMT). It’s described as a way to make phone lines resemble hundreds of sub-channels and improve transmission by snatching bits from the worst channels and donating them to the richest ones. IEEE Spectrum. It eventually became the global standard for DSL, and the chipset became universally adopted over the years.
The company continued to promote its iconic chipset throughout the ’90s, with very limited sales at first but then growing rapidly as the ’90s came to a close and we neared the dot-com bubble.
Then, in 1997, Texas Instruments acquired the company for $395 million, its first hardware deal. The Texas-based semiconductor manufacturer is keen to use Amati’s pioneering DSL technology to deliver broadband multimedia services, including high-speed Internet access and real-time video, over telephone lines.
By the 2000s, millions of chipsets had been shipped, and faster broadband access was making its way into homes and offices in developed countries. While we may now rejoice in its demise – with the rise of full fiber broadband – it’s worth appreciating how important it was to get rid of the dreaded dial tone in the first place, and the possibilities it opened for society as a whole.