>Chris "web pages. eventually." Dollin wrote:
>In article <9957jv$39r$1@soapbox.cs.bham.ac.uk>,
> axs@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>
>> My wife recently connected her PC to Freeserve so I now at last see
>> for myself how slow a link to a site down the road can be (4kb per
>> sec, despite a high speed modem. I wonder if Freeserve deliberately
>> slow it down so that people stay connected longer, and then
>> freeserve get a commission from the telephone company.)
>
>I think 4K/sec is all you can expect from a phone line. I rarely got
>more than that from which.net or lineone.net: sometimes 6K/sec when
>downloading news, which I expect compresses well.
I think 4K/sec is very good. 56K modems are, of course, 56 K bits
per second: a reported download of 4K/sec refers to bytes, i.e.
about 32Kbps. Some people never event connect much above 30Kbps
even with a 56K modem, because the quality of their phone lines
is not good enough.
The point about compression is important too: if you are downloading
a zipped (or otherwise compressed) archive, there is very little
scope for the modems to compress it further.
Incidentally, if anyone still uses ISDN (BT Home Highway, frex),
the ISDN thingies do not compress. So for very compressible data,
theoretically a 56K modem could be faster than a single 64K ISDN
line!
Jonathan
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