🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tuesday, in article
     <19961203001228269242@chadales.demon.co.uk>
     david@chadales.demon.co.uk "Dave Howard" wrote:

DH> I have a 14.4 USR modem which seems to behave itself.
DH> Now I know that 14.4 is slow, and I'm considering upgrading, *but*,
DH> is it worth upgrading when a lot of the speeds that I see as I access
DH> web sites and FTP sites are well below 1k/s, sometimes 800/sec, even
DH> 300, 50, and 0!
DH> 
DH> I think I understand why this happens, but as it does happen why
DH> upgrade?

For web use, I don't find nuch gain with a 28.8 modem over my
old 14.4: my modem is not the bottleneck.  Yes, sometimes I do
get some of the increased throughput I'd expect, but I don't think
I've ever exceeded 2k/sec, at least according to Netscape's
statistics.  Most of the time, like you, I get less than 1k/sec.

I take a lot of newsgroups, and subscribe to many mailing lists,
so my SMTP and NNTP traffic is quite high, and since it
all comes direct from Demon I get a noticeable performance gain
from my 28.8 modem, which I reckon has made it cost-effective.
However, if I wasn't taking so much mail and news, I'd have stuck
with my 14.4 for web usage (if it hadn't been stolen, I'd prob have
stuck with it anyway), and I generally advise my clients to
buy a s/h 14.4 modem for 30quid or so rather than spend 100+ on
a new 28.8.

A further point is that 28.8 connections seem harder to achieve,
and the modems somewhat less reliable, though I've no firm figures.

[cc'd by mail]

-- 
/ P. McNab  // mac@siberia.demon.co.uk /

Is aibohphobia a fear of Palindromes?