U.S. Robotics Corporation, often called USR, is a company that produces USRobotics computer modems and related products.

Its initial marketing was aimed at bulletin board systems, where its high-speed HST protocol made FidoNet transfers much faster, and thus less costly.

The company had a reputation for high quality and support for the latest communications standards as they emerged, notably in its V.Everything line, released in 1996.

With the reduced usage of voiceband modems in North America in the early 21st century, USR began branching out into new markets.

[4] At the time, commonly available modems ran at 300 bit/s, but 1200 bit/s using the mutually incompatible Bell 212A and V.22 standards were available at much higher price points.

Using trellis encoding, HST provided 9,600 bit/s speeds, leapfrogging the standards efforts and offering four times the performance for about twice the price of a 2400 bit/s model.

USR was not the only company making modems with proprietary protocols; Telebit's TrailBlazer series of 1985 offered speeds up to 19.2 kbit/s, and Hayes also introduced the 9600 bit/s Express 96 (or "Ping-Pong") system.

"[6] To compete with the ever growing market for low cost consumer models, USR introduced their Sportster line.

USR then surprised many early Courier V.Everything modem owners with a limited-time free offer of an X2 firmware upgrade, which added 56K speed capability.

[10] It was then recreated as a spin-off of 3Com in June 2000, assuming 3Com's entire client modem business except for the Palm-related portion, which itself had been spun off with Palm three months earlier.

USR then quickly built up its device portfolio, including not only traditional dial-up modems, but also wired- and wireless-networking components.