1960 Toronto [Canada]

The inventor and electrical engineer who created the concept for 56k modems in 1996.
These modems, which operated in the voice frequency band, were capable of download speeds of up to 56,000 bits per second.

Initially, there were two competing modem systems: K56flex and X2.
By the late 1990s, 56k modems were the most popular method of personal Internet access.
The characteristic sounds emitted by these modems were not, as with previous generations, a modulated signal of the data being transferred, but rather the data being transferred.
Communications were beginning to shift from analog to digital.

Born in 1960, Townshend earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1987 and is an expert in signal processing, computer systems design, and statistical modeling. He worked as a principal investigator at Bell Labs from 1987 to 1990, where he studied speech recognition and low-bit-rate speech coding. The Toronto native then moved to Montreal, where he founded Townshend Computer Tools and developed Dat Link, a signal processor for making high-quality audio recordings.

In 1993, he moved Townshend Computer Tools to Menlo Park, California, and began working on MusicFax, for downloading music from servers via direct dial-up connections. It was while working on this project that he came up with the idea for a better modem (which stands for modulate/demodulate), in an attempt to solve the problem of getting high-speed data from a digital server to multiple analog destinations.

Digital modems had been developed earlier, in the 1950s, for data transmission for the military. They were used to send data over the PSTN, or public switched telephone network. AT&T manufactured the first commercial modem in 1962 with a speed of 300 bits per second. By 1993, modems were operating at about 38.6 Kbps. Townshend developed an algorithm that allowed 56K downloads from the internet over standard dial-up telephone connections. This represented a 66% improvement over the performance of existing modems. His technology allowed this to occur only in the download direction, eliminating cumbersome analog-to-digital conversions and maintaining a constant speed. Furthermore, this concept sufficiently met the needs of the typical internet service provider-computer relationship. With his innovative creation, he was ahead of many others who had been working on similar devices.

Townshend received U.S. Patent No. 5,801,695 in 1994 for pulse-code modulation (PCM) client modems. He also received four other patents for related technology. He approached U.S. Robotics with his concepts and later 3Com Corp., which acquired U.S. Robotics and negotiated exclusive rights to his patents. However, several companies began using Townshend's technology without a license, and he subsequently became involved in several high-profile legal battles, most notably with Analog Devices, Cisco Systems, Intel, ESS Technology, and Agere Systems.

Townshend reportedly earned a considerable fortune in licensing fees since 56K modems hit the global market in 1997. In 1998, the International Telecommunication Union ratified the V.90 standard, which incorporates Townshend's algorithm. That standard was later updated as the V.92 standard.

Townshend was a consulting professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and, in 1997, joined Ordinate, a speech assessment software company based in Menlo Park, California, as CEO. The company's PhonePass product is used to assess the ability of non-native English speakers to speak the language. Ordinate was later acquired by Harcourt Assessment, a division of Reed Elsevier's Harcourt Education business.