Page 1 of Anyway of speeding up a 56K modem?

Hi All
Until the Telewest boys move into my area and put in the cable into the grounds- I`m stuck with a 56K modem and `ill have to wait for Blueyonder broadband. I am- like many people- a user of such sites like Grokster. But with a 56k- download times take the mick!! The fastest I get is 5Kb/s and download speeds go even as low as 0.5kb/s!!!!!
I was wondering if there is any software I can download to speed things up. Any good suggestions appreciated.
Have a good one all!
Nav

You may see banner adverts selling software, ignore them.
You can perhaps get a small increase if you download and run something, uh, I forget max something or other.
Basically it controls the size of the packets your computer requests, if they are too large then they will get split up, so setting them down in size saves time. Apparently.
I`m not entirely convinced about it.
Anyway, don`t pay for it, and I`m sure someone can remember the name of the program.

How about adsl?? as some isps do the service for the price of TW/NTL i think.

Yes Definitely check out whether you can get ADSL.!! It`s the dogs bollox!

There isnt any real way of speeding up a 56k modem unfortunately. You are limited to a great extent by the technology. However, you can make some adjustments to how you connect to the internet that may make a difference. Firstly, go to http://www.ispreview.net (i think). Check out their reviews of various ISPs, and look out for one that gets rated highly for speed. These will have a lower ratio of users to servers, and so there will be less traffic for you to get clogged up in. Another way to eke out some more speed is to call your telco (eg BT) and ask them to turn up the `gain` on your line. This basically means they`ll `pump up the volume`, boosting the strength of signals sent down the line, and it may result in a slight increase in connection speed.
You`ll notice that I`m hedging my bets here. Any gain in speed is likely to be very small, given that its a proportion of an already small amount. As the others have said, your best bet is ADSL, or RADSL (if you`re too far from an exchange for regular ADSL). Try http://www.mistral.co.uk for more info. Other than that, well, there is satellite broadband, but it`s prohibitively expensive.
Hope this helps.
Bb

This item was edited on Friday, 5th April 2002, 11:25

With reference to what Bill has just said, I believe that "turning up" the gain decreases quality on the regular telephone connection. So, if you use your phone line to chat as well, you may consider not turning it up the full way, since it is of poorer quality, and you may be more prone to disconnection.

Perhaps you can confirm this, Bill ??


Brian

The original poster should also realise that its 56K BITS per second while the download rates are given in BYTES.

Given that, along with the framing overhead etc., its not suprising that your rate is just over 5k a second - it actually sounds like you have a reasonable connection for 56k. (Sometimes the rates seem higher due to it compressing the data - which it won`t be able to do by much/any for already compressed files - or having already started downloading e.g. when you click on a link and it asks you where to save, it still downloads while you are making your decision)

I think that if you increase the gain on your line then it can reduce the quality of the voice connection, but whether it leads to more/any disconnections, I don`t know. I don`t think that it would make a difference really. It`s very, very rare for a regular voice call to be disconnected nowadays (on a land-line at any rate). Besides, if you do experience problems after increasing the gain, then you can always have it turned down again. All that I think happens, in the worst cases, is that the sound quality decreases somewhat, so you may get more hissing and crackles on the line during voice calls - much like using a poor quality analogue cordless phone.

In this case, as the above poster points out, it seems that the modem is already running at pretty close to its capacity here. Lucky bum. Some of us struggle to get 36k connections from our 56k modems!

go adsl it rocks i have a conexant modem form dabs and pipex do a 24/7 broadband connection for £24 a month i called them only last week and they had me sorted on the 17th and im getting a 576 kbits download connection and a 288 kbits upload and i get over 60 k downloads depending on the site.
i wouldnt go back to 56k as it would frustrate me having to wait but if you cant get adsl or carnt justify the extra price you could use progs like gozilla where it will manage the file download and pick up where it left off if your connection breaks of GETS CUT OFF EVERY 2 HOURS i used to hate that when i was on freeserve.
try these sites 4 info on adsl...hope this helps...baz
http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/
http://bandwidthplace.com/
http://www.broadbandmap.co.uk/
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/broad1.shtml
http://www.speedguide.net/
http://www.themad-house.co.uk/
http://www.dabs.com/home.asp (adsl conexant modems)