10 K / s on a 56700bps modem????

[dgardner]

It occured to me the other day why my modem would only connect at 33600 bps I had always put it down to the cheap nasty phone extension cable I use but then I suddenly realised that my modem was built before the days of V.90. So one quick modem flash later and welcome back to the world of 33600 bps and above. MY first move was to try napster and a download, choose song, select someone with quick ping speed download. 10.2 K /s errr thats got to be wrong, i'll just let it settle down. Waits and waits and waits. Stays at 10.2 K / s errr ok. Check out Microsofts page for speed testing result is 9.6 K / s. someone enlighten me I thought this was impossible from a modem, I though you needed ISDN or upwards for this?? Was it just a fluke I havent connected at that since!

~Dave~

[Bonehead]

I wish it was always that good, but try some more sites where you can download something. You will see that it's usually (way) slower.

[Hellmund]

Yeh I get speeds like that off my 56k from Microsoft as well. Maybe you should try a game online like halflife and that'll show you how fast the connection is.It tends to increase the d/l speed if your close to where your downloading from.My ISP is speedlink and when I downloaded ICQ from their page it went at 10k/s constant the whole time.Not sure if it's right or not but I aint complaining.
Hellmund

[Tex_Gex]

I get the same thing on certains sites. I've seen it stay at a steady 13.6 when updating usenet newsgroups. Could it be Modem compression ?

Aloha

[Ruahrc]

How about this one?

A long while ago, I followed a link to Intel's website pointing me to a page where I could download a USB Testing utility. I went to the page- saw the link. ~500KB, "not too bad, I'll download it" so I click on it.

(For the record this was on a 28.8 connection!)

I was getting constant 12K/s the whole time! (on a 28.8!) I thought something was wrong at first but it never settled down or anything! It was amazing, but too bad I haven't downloaded that fast since http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/frown.gif.

...waiting till the days of widespread broadband...

Ruahrc

[Jez]

I have experienced 'extra' compression on MP3 files when using hardware compressions, but not software compression. I guess maybe a modem can compress in hardware in ways that software cannot.

Dunno?

Jez.

[AuraEdge]

The only answer would be compression. On a 56k connection, the max theoretical download would be 7.0k/s (8kbps per 1k/s) However, you will notice that when you download some things like .BMPs, or large files, the first 1-10% will be extremely fast (upwards of 15-20k/s on my 48k connection) This is because there is lots of 'air' in the code or file you are downloading, most of which gets very commpressed down. Try downloading a Linux Distibution on a Dialup and you'll know what Im talking about. What I find wierd is that MP3's are already in a commpressed format. MP3's are VERY unlikely to have that much empty code in them. Got me on this one...