The 10 most important technologies you never think about

on demand and to compete with the cable companies at their own game.

Or so they thought. The plans of the telcos for video on demand dried up by the mid-1990s, but the technology remained. Now called DSL, it had morphed into a high-speed household on-ramp to the Internet. The cable companies followed suit with a comparable technology, and the broadband speed race--for both DSL and cable--began in earnest.

Both cable and DSL still use traditional frequency signaling over copper wires, but new breakthroughs are poised to go mainstream. Fiber to the premises (FTTP) promises lightning-fast network speeds, and WiMax will push broadband into territories that wires can't reach today. As for what applications this next broadband revolution will bring--well, we have only begun to imagine.