I live in the country and can only get dial up. My dial up provider says that it puts out 56 k.....?

Question

My desktop will only get around 30 kbps, and my laptop which is almost new will only get like 40 kpbs. Anyone have any suggestions about that? Both computers have really good modems. Also, will adding more RAM to my older computer speed up the Internet connection?

Answer 1

Any telecommunications speed is what the link is RATED at, that is, it's the speed the data could travel at if everything worked perfectly. You'll almost never get throughput at that speed, and never consistently. This is due to the need to retransmit pieces of messages because they were garbled somewhere along the way (electromagnetic interference, sunspots, bad connections).

Extra memory probably won't help any of those problems.

Sorry.

Answer 2

56Kbps is the fastest that V.90/v.92 modem will be able to sync up at. It will achieve 56Kbps under ideal circumstances only. If you live in the sticks, odds are the quality of the telephone circuit between you and your ISP isn't that great. Therefore the modems, regardless of their quality aren't able to link up at the highest rate.

It's kind of like trying to drive a corvette on a dirt road. You can do it, but it's not optimal conditions for the car to work it's best.

The modems will first try and connect at 56Kbps. If that fails they start falling back and trying in increments of 2.4Kbps until they get a reliable connection. That is what all that screaming and whining is when they first connect.

V.92 is the end of the technology road for analog modems, it's amazing that engineers were able to squeeze that out of a 3.3Khz voice circuit.