Wildcard: ? about dial-up connection

[Wildcard]

I am using dial-up for Internet connection. I almost always connect at 46666 or 45333 bps. No complaints, everything works fine - thank God!

? is, I'm told by several people, including a telephone technician, that phone lines coming into my home will only handle a "true" connection rate of 19200.

Is this so? Then, if it is, how does my ISP justify "announcing" my connection as 45333 or 46666?

Thanks,
Wildcard

[Parker]

> I am using dial-up for Internet connection.
> I almost always connect at 46666 or 45333
> bps. No complaints, everything works fine -
> thank God!

> ? is, I'm told by several people, including
> a telephone technician, that phone lines
> coming into my home will only handle a
> "true" connection rate of 19200.

> Is this so? Then, if it is, how does my ISP
> justify "announcing" my connection
> as 45333 or 46666?

The secret is data compresson. The modem protocol compresses the files, sends them over the phone line, and then expands them, resulting in an effective data transfer rate of 45333 Kbps or whatever, even though the data is only actually flowing across the phone line at 19,200 Kbps - if that!

Now, some ISP's, such as Earthlink, are offering "Accelerated Dial-Up" which utilizes more compression to increase the effective data transfer "up to 5 times that of conventional dial-up."

Well, I've been playing with it and have been unable to get anywhere near 5X dialup speed, but I have been able to get 2.5X or so - a noticeable improvement.

A big disadvantage of this is that it is a Windows-only program (so far).

[Norm Wattenberger]

Phone lines are only capable of handling a limited baud rate. Higher speed modems transmit multiple bits in one baud. Therefore, the bps rate is higher than the baud rate.

[Parker]

> Phone lines are only capable of handling a
> limited baud rate. Higher speed modems
> transmit multiple bits in one baud.
> Therefore, the bps rate is higher than the
> baud rate.

To add to the confusion, we have bits, bytes, and baud, which are sometimes (incorrectly) used interchangably, but which have specific different meanings.

But it makes a great subject line. :-)

[Wildcard]

> To add to the confusion, we have bits,
> bytes, and baud, which are sometimes
> (incorrectly) used interchangably, but which
> have specific different meanings.

> But it makes a great subject line. :-)

During college days, and I have no idea why they did this, perhaps a fund raiser, but...the students came up with this mud wrestling thing. What an incredible mess! Anyway, one of my classmates decided she was gonna join in the wrestling thing and had a t-shirt printed with "Byte the Baud" printed on the front on back.

Pretty creative I thought, she's probably still trying to get the mud out of various places. :-)