Mr. Wright said that RealNetworks learned from the experience of MP3-sharing sites that plenty of dial-up customers were willing to download a file of that size, particularly if they can do it in the background.
But there was plenty of behind-the-scenes dialing to fill the seats and shape the audience beforehand.
That said, the R&D efforts (which I've asked the company about) suggest there is plenty of room for improvement still, however dialed in the rocket itself is.
The mobile grabs data off the Web about three times as fast as a regular dial-up phone connection, plenty of speed for e-mail and sending photographs or videoclips.
The heat is on for ISPs to grab the unclaimed market share in the dial-up space, and there are plenty of players fighting for it.
But there are still plenty of people who cling to the comfort of slender hands pointing to numbers spaced around a dial under which an astonishingly intricate mechanism beats as delicately as a hummingbird's heart.
Plenty of economists disagree.
