Why is dialup so slow?

Question

its really ANNOYING me

i cant get broadband my mum wont let us she says it to expencive and we have a 52.0kbps dialup thing

Answer 1

It is what it is. Dial-up has always been slow. It probably will remain so.

Answer 2

Dialup uses only the frequencies carried by a phone voice line. Most phone voice lines are converted to a digital signal at the exchange. The digital signal is normally around 56kbits/second and this is the absolute maximum that a dialup can use. If the voice line quality is not perfect, the connection is slower and it is normal for speeds to be anything from 20kbit/sec up.

Of course your modem must be capable of 56kbit, older modems were 28k,14.4k,9.6k all the way down to 300bit/sec in the oldest modems.

Nowadays, web sites are designed with at least 256kbit/sec download speed, most people have a DSL connection or better. So things seem even slower on dialup because content is more complex than it used to be.

Answer 3

The *theoretical* limit for dialup transfer speeds is 56 kilobits/second (kbps). Compare this to DSL, which ranges between 256 kbps - 24,000 kbps. Cable falls between 384 kbps - 20,000 kbps.

Line noise, poor signal quality, etc. will all slow transmission speeds. In the US, the FCC regulates dialup slightly, down to 53 kbps.

The sad truth is that phone lines were invented for voice transmission and not data transmission. Using an analog medium for transmitting data is relatively inefficient - it is analogous to using Morse Code.

"High speed" dialup is relatively misleading in its name. The internet service provider (ISP) compresses data selectively, placing more work on the user's computer. Throughput speed is not changed.

I'd recommend upgrading to cable or DSL if it is available in your area. If not, you may be better suited by a satellite internet provider - they have very fast throughput speeds, but relatively high latency (thus, good for downloading large files but bad for online gaming).

Hopefully that all makes sense. Enjoy!

Answer 4

There is nothing you can do about this, dialup uses a modem with internet speed of about 56kbs broadband is about 500kbs. See the difference? The only thing you can do is upgrade to broadband.

Answer 5

Voice lines require an audio bandwidth of around 4KHz, that requires a sampling rate of about 8KHz and they use an 8 bit resolution so you get 8x8000 = 64000 bits per second. But the least significant bit of one channel is used for signalling and there's no way to know if it's your channel so the best you can get out of digital voice likes is 56kbps. Turns out that that is all you can do when you stick an analog signal over a digital line too.

Netzero also throttles their link, so you only get about 1/4 of the available bandwidth on their cheap access.

Answer 6

ester buneys phone number
3533455

Answer 7

the pipe is small