HTML 4.0 provides extensions for style sheets, scripting, frames, embedding objects, improved support for right to left and mixed direction text, richer tables, and enhancements to forms, offering improved accessibility for people with disabilities. Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, Bell, and other companies have joined together in the Universal ADSL Working Group and announced plans for new high speed modems, capable of running at up to 6Mbps, many times the speed of current modems. They will use a conventional copper phone line, while still permitting simultaneous voice calls on the same line. It sounds like having your cake and eating it. The new modems use ADSL which divides the bandwidth of the copper line into several frequency ranges, each capable of carrying a different part of the same data transmission simultaneously.
Modems have to be at each end to encode and decode the signals.
A frequency range at the bottom of the spectrum is reserved for the ordinary telephone service. Well, in the UK it all depends on BT being interested in providing a service. BT will obviously not do so unless they can make money out of it, which implies that some method of metering usage will be needed. If BT go about it the right way they could pull back many of the customers they have lost to the cable companies over the last few years.