PC Qs and As

Everyone thought it was amazingly fast and I guess it was because the average program was less than 300k. The old 2400 was capable of about 250cps (characters per second) max. Well, enough of that, I'm starting to feel old.

Now your average size program is from 2 to 650 meg. and the new modems are capable of 57,600. This is roughly 6,500 cps at optimum conditions. If you do any downloading you're probably saying,"I've got to have one of those". But, there are a few variables you have to take into account, assuming your computer is up to snuff.

One is the phone company, old Ma Bell's lines are just barely adequate for good voice quality. So, you can imagine what it does to a modem that is talking at high frequencies and pushing the envelope at that. The lines are so bad in some in some parts of town its like hitting speed bumps on the Autobaun.

You may even be able to get higher connect rates on a 800 telephone line. The reason behind this is; If you are calling another modem in lets say California it may have to travel a relatively short distance over good quality line and then continue its journey over the satellite.

The next obstacle is that your transfer rates are only as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you are connected to your Internet provider at 33,600 and you hit a Webb site that it's provider is only 28,800 then the fastest possible data transfer speed is 28,800 or the slower of the two.

You also have to take into account that when a modem runs into a traffic jam, the more people connected to a remote Internet or online service computer the slower the service becomes. Let's say 300 people want to download files at the same time from the same computer.

The computer has to divide its time to each computer connected to it and transfer speed goes down. That's the reason the Internet performs better at 3:00 A.M. Monday opposed to 8:00 P.M.Saturday. I suspect this situation will worsen with the new 56k modems.

At the present there are two 57,600 technologies that are not compatible with each other. One is Hayes and the other is U.S.Robotics. Of both the best can only do 53k so the 56k title is only pseudo. In the past U.S. Robotics has always been the flagship in modem technology and will probably remain.