Lately I have been banished to the land of DUN. When I use my laptop and use the pcmcia (56k 3com) modem my fastest speed to connect has been 45.2kbps.
I connected an external us robotics 56k to the serial port and average 49-52k when I use that but no noticeable difference.
I am now connected via my pcmcia card at what is reported as 28.8 yet this is the fastes dun connection I have ever had. I’ve tried multiple web sites, chat clients, some audio & video (still slow, but actually runs) and ftp and it’s freaky.
about the fastest actual speed you can get with a modem is 33.6k. 56k uses packet compression to essentially give you 56k worth of info in a 28.8 or 33.6 bandwidth.
Some things, video and streaming programs and other things simply dont compress well, neither do most downloaded programs that are already in zip or other archive format.
often the 28.8 and 33.6 connections will be more stable, less likely to have issues with line noise, and also have the advantage of not using as much processing time.
Thanks, Quint Essence. That makes sense. The house I live in is very old and I’m sure the phone wiring not much younger.
I guess then a genral genaral question would be:
Should I force it to connect at a slower speed as oppsed to the 115k standard dun setting? (I realize the speed limitation and I would guess that the 115k default must be taking compression based on a possible standard highest into consideration. obviously you can set the default to even higher. to what benefit. i have no clue.)
This is just plain wrong. Standard POTS phone lines have a maximum carrying capacity of 64Kbits/second. Modems use 7 of the 8 bits for data and another for parity, giving a maximum theoretical capacity of 56Kbits/second. Most modems also untilise compression which means that you can sometimes get up to 12 - 15 KBytes/second download speeds but the maximum limit for good quality, non-compressed data streams is 56Kbits/sec