The first widely deployed commercial modem standard, using frequency-shift keying (FSK) to carry data over an ordinary telephone line. Full-duplex operation was achieved by assigning different tone pairs to the originating and answering ends. At 300 bps, it could transmit roughly 30 characters per second — fast enough to keep pace with a teletype terminal.

The first mass-market 1200 bps modem, using phase-shift keying (PSK) to encode two bits per symbol. Backward compatible with Bell 103 at 300 bps. The Bell 212A made time-sharing services and early online databases practical for business users, and established 1200 bps as the entry-level speed for a decade.

The modem that changed the industry. Not the fastest, not the first — but the first to include an embedded microprocessor and a software command interface (the AT command set) that allowed a computer to dial, answer, and hang up without human intervention. The distinctive black box with its row of status LEDs became the defining image of early personal computing.

US Robotics established its reputation for quality with the Courier series, which became the preferred modem for BBS sysops throughout the late 1980s and 1990s. Solid construction, reliable connections, and aggressive firmware updates kept the Courier line at the forefront of performance. The Courier's status LEDs were a familiar sight on the shelves of anyone running a serious BBS.

The V.32bis standard brought 14,400 bps to the mass market and was the first speed at which downloading a typical software program became a practical activity measured in minutes rather than hours. Rockwell's chipsets powered the majority of V.32bis modems from multiple manufacturers, making Rockwell the Intel of the modem world.

The Sportster was the consumer counterpart to the professional Courier — slightly less robust but far more affordable, and the modem that most households bought when upgrading to V.34. It shipped in enormous quantities through retail channels and mail-order catalogues. The distinctive grey-and-black plastic enclosure sat on desks across the English-speaking world through the mid-1990s.

US Robotics' implementation of 56k technology, launched before the V.90 standard was agreed. The Courier V.Everything was the flagship product of the standards war: sold to ISPs and serious users who wanted maximum speed and were willing to ensure their ISP ran compatible equipment. Heavy, solidly built, and ferociously capable.

The software modem — or Winmodem — was the final form of the dial-up modem as a mass-market commodity. By offloading all signal processing to the host CPU and running it as a Windows driver, manufacturers reduced the modem card to a few dollars' worth of components. Shipped as standard equipment in millions of OEM PCs from 1999 onward.

The SpeedTouch Home was among the first consumer ADSL modems to be deployed at scale in Europe, particularly in the UK and France. Available in USB and Ethernet variants, it introduced millions of households to always-on broadband for the first time. Its distinctive curved white enclosure was a deliberate design departure from the utilitarian boxes of the dial-up era.

Westell was the dominant ADSL modem supplier for the North American market in the early broadband years, deploying millions of units through Bell Atlantic (later Verizon) and other regional Bell operating companies. The WireSpeed series were the modems that most Americans plugged in when ordering DSL for the first time, typically arriving in a box from the phone company.

The DG834G was one of the first widely adopted combined ADSL modem-router-Wi-Fi devices, and for many users it was the product that made wireless home networking a practical reality. Its integrated design — one box replacing the separate modem, router, and wireless access point — set the template for the home gateway devices that followed.

Huawei's white-label ADSL2+ routers were deployed by telephone companies worldwide under dozens of different brand names — BT, Orange, SFR, Telkom, and many others. The hardware inside was often identical; only the firmware branding differed. Huawei became the dominant supplier of DSL customer premises equipment globally through the 2000s, on the strength of competitive pricing and reliable chipsets.

The SURFboard series was the defining cable modem product line for the North American market. The SB3100 and its successors were deployed by cable operators including Comcast, Time Warner, and Cox in volumes of millions. Compact, reliable, and straightforward, the SURFboard established the physical and functional template for cable modem hardware.

Scientific Atlanta (acquired by Cisco in 2006) was the other major force in cable modem hardware alongside Motorola. The DPC2100 was deployed widely by North American cable operators as they upgraded to DOCSIS 2.0 to improve upstream capacity. The hardware was often provided by the cable operator as rental equipment, contributing to the business model of recurring equipment rental fees that persists to this day.

The AirCard 555 was among the first widely deployed mobile data cards for laptops, sliding into the PC Card (PCMCIA) slot that was standard on business notebooks of the era. Sierra Wireless pioneered the embedded mobile broadband category, supplying cards to enterprise users who needed connectivity away from the office before Wi-Fi was ubiquitous. At GPRS speeds, it was slower than dial-up — but it worked anywhere there was a GSM signal.

The E220 was the product that created the mass market for mobile broadband. A self-contained HSDPA modem the size of a large thumb drive, it required no PCMCIA slot, no driver disc, and almost no technical knowledge to use. Mobile operators worldwide white-labelled it under their own brands and sold it with prepaid SIM cards at supermarket checkouts. The E220 made mobile internet as easy to buy as a soft drink.

The MiFi 2200 launched in 2009 and popularised the mobile hotspot concept: a pocket-sized device combining a 3G modem with a Wi-Fi router, allowing up to five devices to share a single mobile data connection. No cables, no configuration — just a device the size of a credit card that created a personal Wi-Fi bubble wherever it went. It became indispensable for travellers and road warriors.

The Qualcomm Gobi series represented the transition from external mobile modems to embedded silicon. The MDM9615 modem chipset was integrated into laptops, tablets, and smartphones as a soldered component, invisible to the user. It supported both LTE and the full range of 3G fallback standards across multiple frequency bands, enabling a single device to work on networks worldwide.

The Snapdragon X55 was the second-generation 5G modem from Qualcomm and the chip that powered the first wave of mainstream 5G smartphones, including the Samsung Galaxy S20 series. A single chip supporting 5G mmWave, 5G Sub-6 GHz, LTE, 3G, and 2G in both standalone and non-standalone 5G modes across virtually every frequency band used globally. The engineering complexity of fitting this capability into a few square millimetres of silicon is staggering.