Data Integrity: Dial-up vs. Broadband

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Does anybody know the data integrity of dial-up Internet connection? Does dial-up use sound tones to represent digits? If so, wouldn't dial-up have less integrity than a broadband connection?

I'm not sure what you mean exactly by integrity. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that the various protocols/layers in digital communications have things like check-summing, simple error correction, and signals that say "data was corrupted -- send it again."

I think a flakier communication method would just run slower because a lot of data is having to be re-sent, rather than the data being corrupted.

But maybe someone else knows more.

Do you mean 56K phone line vs xDSL? In that case xDSL have much more refined error correction techniques which is necessary because it operates at much higher bandwidth. I'm pretty sure xDSL also offer better mtbf rate but don't quote me on that.

Tone is just a sine curve signal that is audible to human. Both 56K and xDSL use it as the basic building block but both combine more than 1 curve at different frequency to increase bandwidth. 56K assume the whole infrastructure is mostly analog so it only use the range that a normal phone is designed to use. xDSL assumed that most of the infrastructure is digital and use a much higher frequency range (so the signal won't be audible anymore), that's why a single line can be used for both phone and xDSL service.

Current speeds of internet access are a mediocre 50Mbps... That's slow. I wonder if I can bridge two cable modems together to get faster speeds
This is of course, in the UK ... always so far behind with technology