How on EARTH did my dialup connection do this?!

D

Dlatu1983

Prime Minister
I have a 56k connection that tends to run a bit slow...usually around 3k...takes me around 6 minutes to download 1MB from a relatively fast source. Someone just sent me a 2.8MB file, and the entire thing was downloaded in 3 minutes. That's almost 1MB per minute, which (by my calculations) is almost 18Kbps. How'd my connection manage that?
 
The modem decided to work correctly this time?
It could be the phone company update/upgraded your lines. This could take place farther along the line than right by your home.
 
It doesn't matter what kind of file it was; the type of data doesn't affect download rate, inasmuch as it affects file size.

I'd guess that you got a spike of speed, as you should only be able to download at 7 KBps. According to my own calculations, you got about 15.5 KBps, which is unusual. Keep downloading and see if this speed keeps up; if not, then you got a spike and you should be gracious to the phone company.
 
For what it's worth, when I was on dial up, I was downloading a file from some univeristy's server and it was about 3am in the morning. The transfer speed was a steady 12.5 kilobyte all the way through the 20 some-odd MB file. 56K modems do have the capability of having high transfer speeds, it all depends on the physical location and quality of the connection from client/server.

Also, in reality normal phone lines can only transfer at 28.8 kbps (kilobits). To acheive the higher transfer speeds, TCP/IP compression is used. Packets are compressed when sending, decompressed when receiving. Hardware modems are very good at this which is why you'll get better performance out of them as opposed to crappy "winmodems" that rely on the main CPU for (de)compression.
 
The fastest I've seen my modem go is 11 per second ... and that was from Apple's update server... usually I go at 5.
 
The fastest the modem within this G3 ever connected was 28.8... maybe Lycander's reason was why.
 
Gosh dangit, what this board really needs is a sticking-the-tounge-out smiley so all of us modem users can use it on bobw. In the meantime.... :p

;)
 
:p ... For some reason, this does not look like a tongue to me... I thought it was just an open mouth. The ones in AIM and iChat actually look like tongues, and not open mouths. alright. I apologize
 
: plus p = :p

You're right; it should probably be a profile or something. Kind of a Peanuts type of :p.
 
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