[phire]

Yes, the actual bandwidth of the last-mile analog line was much, much higher. Hence why we eventually got 8mbit ADSL or 24mbit ADSL 2.0+ running across it. Or even 50-300mbit with VDSL in really ideal conditions.

Though the actual available bandwidth was very dependent on distance. People would lease dedicated pairs for high bandwidth across town (or according to a random guy I talked to at a cafe: just pirate an unused pair that happened to run between their two buildings). But once we start talking between towns, the 32kbit you could get from the digital trunk lines was almost always higher than what you could get on a raw analog line over the same distance.