For roughly three years USB 1.0 was one of the few choices for connecting external devices to PCs. In the year 2000 a group of companies banded together to improve USB 1.1. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lucent Technologies, NEC and Philips, which formed the USB Implementers’ Forum or USB-IF, worked together to bring a new standardization into light. The new USB was called USB 2.0 and with its new standard transfer rate of 480 Mbit/s, the speed increased 40 times over USB 1.1.