When I log in to work from my cabin in the sticks I’m lucky if I can get 30kbps, but when I log in to work from the city I routinely get 50-52kbps.
and
FTR there’s no cable up here, DSL isn’t feasible, and apparently satellite doesn’t play well with VPNs, so for the time being I’m stuck with a land line.
Thanks!
The lower bandwidth is usually due to noise on the line. The two ends of the connection will negotiate down to a speed with an acceptable error rate. You may be able to nag your phone company into giving you a lower-noise connection if you explain the reason. IME, they can tweak the connections between you and the switch to improve things if they’re motivated. You may also be able to improve this by upgrading your in-house wiring.
Also, you might look into ISDN. My house in the sticks is way outside DSL or cable service areas. I got an ISDN which provides very good 128K service - not fast by DSL standards but much better than a modem. Interestingly, my phone company apologized for not being able to give me an ISDN with local numbers, so my SPIDs are in an area code over a hundred miles distant. This worked out well because there is no local ISP providing ISDN connections, but since the SPIDs on my ISDN are in a distant area code, a connection to a provider in that city is a local call.
The downside is that ISDN service is more expensive than DSL, cable or satellite. I pay ~$50/month to the phone company for the dual-channel ISDN line and another ~$50/month to the ISP I connect to with that line. I could get a cheaper (and, in my testing flakier) ISP, but still have to pay separately for the line and the ISP. An ISDN does handle voice as well as data, and an ISDN router can be configured to automatically drop one data channel when a voice call comes in. This might allow you to replace your existing voice line with dual-channel ISDN and lower the overall cost somewhat.
There’s a couple of possible reasons. For one, rural lines tend to be less well-maintained than urban or suburban lines. If you notice any crackling, hissing, popping or other extraneous noise during phone conversations, it’s likely that this is part of the reason for the slow connection. Another thing is that you’re likely much farther from the CO at your rural location. Cities are dense, and you’re seldom more than 3,000 to 5,000 wire feet from the CO, whereas in the sticks, you can easily be 15,000 to 20,000 wire feet away or more. This added distance increases inductive and capacitive losses which can act to slow a dialup connection. Unfortunately, neither if these things are fixable by you. What you can do is to check all the wiring and jacks in your house and replace and wiring which looks damaged, tighten up any loose connections, and replace corroded jacks and terminals.
Your location is listed as NYC. You have a log cabin in New York City?
Interesting. I might be able to get my company to spring for ISDN if it’s available. I’ll have to look into that. I never really considered it because I always thought it would be way too expensive but those prices aren’t too bad.
You know, when I contemplate the interior of the cabin, I imagine what a great duplex apartment it would make. But no, it’s in the Catskills. Home base, such as it is, is my apartment in NYC.
I worked for U.S. Robotics at the time they developed the X2 modem, which bumped dial-up speeds to 56K (53K actually; required loss pads at the CO make 56K impractical in real-life scenarios). There are two major common causes of variable connection sppeds that you may want to note:
Analog spectrum smear after d/a conversion, which is more common when dialing from a location farther from the CO. 56K works because the technology assumes the head-end modem (the one you’re dialing into) is connected directly to a T1 line, i.e. its interface is completely digital. This digitally connected end is the only one that sends at 56K; your uplink is limited to the analog maximum of 33.6K (there’s an AT command–IIRC ati4, but check you manual). Once the data is converted from D/A, connect speeds are controlled by the length and quality of the analog run. In some rural areas, these runs can be ~4-5 miles, in most towns/cities they’re <1 mile.
T1 Robbed-bit signaling. A T1 line carries 24 8-bit digital timeslots, for a total of 192 bits. Signaling on the T1 line is carried by “robbing” the least significant bit of every sixth timeslot, giving a total of 4 bits per frame to send signaling data. If the timeslot that’s being robbed carries an analog call, the distortion is virtually unnoticeable. For modem traffic, obviously, any bit change can cause havoc. In live testing, I’ve see the effect where 1 in every 6 calls results in a connect rate up to 20KB lower. Newer modems (post 2000?) include a mitigation scheme in SW to detect if they’re using a robbed-bit channel on a particular call and work around it, generally reducing this drop to around 1.66667KB. If you’re modem is older, you may notice this drop as well.
Probably more than you needed to know, but I never thought I’d have an opportunity to discuss this again, now that DSL and Cable Modems are so common. Prattling mode now canceled.
Hey, no problem.
opens desk drawer, pulls out old external US Robotics X2 modem (Sportster!), regards it fondly, puts it back in desk drawer
Oh that Sportster…I estimate I entered “AT” into that thing roughly a million times…