Back in the day, we had a 56k modem but our connection never really got any faster than 30k due to something with our phone line I never quite understood. My usual download rate was around 3.5kb/s but one day, I was downloading some file and it was going unusually fast - around 15kb/s, and it just kept going faster and faster. By the time it finished it was around 70kb/s. No, I didn’t misplace a decimal point, 70kb/s. That’s, what, 560kbps? A fair bit more than what the modem should have been capable of, especially considering the slow speeds we usually got. I wanted to investigate this phenomenon a little further, see if the speed was still there etc., but then my computer crashed right then because I was running Windows ME. On restarting, it was back to the usual snail’s crawl.
Questions:
- How is it possible for a 56k modem to go that fast? What is actually regulating the speed?
- Why wasn’t I getting that sort of speed, or even 56kbps, before?
- Can you deliberately set up a 56k modem to go that fast, and will you be in legal trouble if you do? (I have no interest in doing this, I’m just wondering)