Ok lets get rid of 90% of the posts I am going to get in response right off the bat… I know 56 bps cannot be reached with a 56k modem.
Why on earth can I not get higher than 15 bps on my 56k Internal modem? WTF is going on here?
Also, why on Earth does my Download timer always go UP instead of down? (It will start with something like "2:00 remaining… it will then change to “2:30 remaining” and climb higher. (2 minutes is just an example as d/ls obviously depend on the size of the file)
Bump, I heard something about the phone lines before, explain what “cruddy” is, and what I can do about it… for free.
I connect at home, which is about 20 miles from downtown Atlanta (GA). My mailing adress is Atlanta, (Not a lesser suburb) so I wonder what my speed would be if I were further away.
In short, if your phone lines are old and noisy, all you can do about it is to bitch to your phone company. There’s certainly no self-help that will alleviate the problem. If your phone connection is noisy (interference from mechanical switches, long runs of mildy corroded copper), your modem will drop down to the maximum speed it can reliably maintain. If your phone company can’t be persuaded to improve the situation (and why should they? - they would gain nothing from doing so), about all you can do is pray for cable, or spring for satellite Internet (pricey!).
When was the last time you checked and cleaned the connections in your line’s access box ? They get corroded and covered with black copper oxide which cuts down on the signal quality. Here’s a recent thread on cleaning the connections. There’s also a more extensive thread sometime in the past year. Do a search for it when the hamsters are feeling friskier than they are tonight.
There’s a difference in meaning between 56 kbps (little k) and 5.6 K/sec (capital K). The little k means kilobits, and the big K means kilobytes. A byte is 8 bits, so divide a figure in kilobits by 8 to obtain the value in kilobytes. The same goes for megabits and megabytes. You’ll find this difference in almost all discussion on networking technologies, as the bandwidth of network connections is usually given in a multiple of bits per second.
14K is pretty sad. Might be worthwhile to get the lines looked at. One thing I do remember from the bad old analog days before I got cable internet, and complained once about crappy line speeds, was that the phone company wil not respond (at least then) to a “poor modem speed” call. They could care less what your connect rate is, the only thing they are interested in maintaining “voice” line quality. So if you are going to complain make it about poor voice line quality overall “ie scratchiness etc.”
Chances are better than even they will find something corroded or poorly connected, and replace it, which may help line speed.
Another possible thought, it could be that your modem crapped out. Did it ever connect faster? Do the download times jump up by large amounts? Does a 2 minute download jump to 3, 4 then 8 minutes? If so it could be a problem with the modem. I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count.
Per sleestak’s excellent note, one thing I forgot to mention is that there is typically a section in the modem setup menus which allows limiting or fixing the maximum allowable connect speed. It might be worth checking this to make sure it is not set too slow.
In the sense that 5.6 is roughly equal to 7… (56/8)
TCP/IP overhead (like ack packets that don’t carry any data other than “I got that last packet you sent”), latency issues (like not sending out too many data packets before they get back the ack from previous packets), and retransmissions (doesn’t take much line noise to cause a lost packet on a 56K line) will always keep you from achieving your theoretical maximum speed.
Heh, just about the same situation here. Maybe the lines here are crappy? I couldn’t get above 28.8 in two seperate places here. I finally had to get DSL.
In most serial protocols, if you divide the number of bits per second by 10 you will roughly get the bytes per second. Even though there are 8 bits in a byte, there is also some overhead associated with things like start and stop bits, checksums, or whatever packet info is in the protocol. If you want to be a bit more accurate (no pun intended) then divide by 12.