I have dial up, I'm going to be getting cable this spring, when it's available on my street. My question is, I can never connect higher than 28.8k, I have multipl phone lines in the house, and neither can conect higher than 28k, and my neighbors can go 56k all the time. Is this most likely a modem problem, or phone line problem? I do have I beleive up to date modems, Im using a gateway now I got last summer new.. I don't think it's a "v.92" or anythign like that, all I hear is it's a "56k modem". Advice would be appreciated, thanks:)


Dan

I'm using Conexant something or another V.90 56k Modem and am currently connected at 48,000bps. I usually connect at that or 46,667bps. The most likely cause of your slow connection speeds are your phone lines suck, or your ISP does. Just wondering, do you live in an older house, cause a friend of mine has added on to his house and he can connect at 48,000 in the room that he added on to, but the original part of his he can only connect at like 31,000BPS.

First question would be what kind of modem do you have?

If it's a software modem, there's a few things you can do.

1. Make sure you've got the most recent drivers from the manufacturers website (or you can call Gateway, they should be able to help with this)

2. Check your system resources. Anything less then 70% will kill the speed of a software modem.

The most likely cause of your slow connection speeds are your phone lines About a year ago I started having connection problems. Never really got a good connection speed to begin with very often, but it started to usually be 24000, sometimes less... and started to drop carrier once in a while. I noticed then that when I was talking on the phone I could hear faint static in the line.

I went outside and tore out the whole phone line from the interface all the way into the house, and replaced it all. Even replaced the jacks. Bang! Next modem call, same ISP: 48000bps.

Heh, interesting how the problem could possibly have to do with the house and how old it is.. Yea, the house is around 15 years old I believe, fairly old I guess.

I know it's not an ISP problem, I've used multiple isp's including AOL and some other local isp's..

Thanks:)

I used to connect really slow ~28k, but I called up the phone company. They put in a new box at the side of the house and now I mostly connect at 36000, 37333, or 38666.

I know there are still problems with the phone line somewhere, I think it must be along the driveway, because the day after a (really hard) rain, I sometimes connect as slow as 12k :eek: :D

Yar!
I want to know the reason too!

I mostly got 24000bps or 26400bps. How to make it goes higer?

I am using cable BTW.

This is almost always (99.999% of the time) a problem with either the phone lines in the house or with something the phone company has done in provisioning those lines.

What most people don't realize is that when you order a phone line from the phone company, by law all they have to provide you with is what's called POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) - basically as long as your line is capable of clearly transmitting your voice during a telephone conversation, the telephone company has met it burden. POTS lines are 9600 bits per second lines. And so if you're getting *anything* over 9600 bits per second, you are getting *more* than the phone company is required to provide you.

One of the most common causes of something like this is that the phone company ran out of phone lines to your street. Instead of putting in the effort and money of running more phone lines from the central office, instead they put in a line duplexer - basically splitting some or all of the existing lines into two lines. This gives them the ability to continue adding new phone lines - but it cuts the transmission speed of each separate line in half.

Unfortunately, if this is what they've done, there's not a whole lot you can do about it. As I mentioned above, the phone company isn't required to provide anything higher than POTS service. So you may be stuck.

The other possibility is that the lines in your house are old or corroded. In a 15-year-old house, that's not likely. I'd say it's much more likely that the phone company is using a duplexer on your line (when you requested your second phone line, they probably simply duplexed your first phone line instead of running a separate line - which is why you end up with 50% speed on both lines in your house).

You *might* be able to solve this by ordering a 3rd phone line. They'd have to run a new line in from the pole for that, and that line might not be duplexed. But it might. You just never know.

Realistically, though, you're pretty well stuck. Sorry.

Jason