I unfortunatly am stuck with dial up. Theres really no way around it because i cant afford to run a cable line back to my house because its a little while off the main road and dsl seems to have no interest in the area i live. Since im stuck with this i wanted to make the best of my connection. I have a 56k modem Intel 537ep v9x modem and i also have netzero. The phone number i connect to supposedly is capeable of 56k but im only connecting at 28.8 and usually never higher. I just want to be able to have better speeds to tide me over for broadband can anyone please help me.

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What about satellite broadband? They may not have it where you live, but if they do its defiantly worth a look. Also, if you have a copper phone line to your house, is there any problem with getting DSL? or doesn't your exchange support it?

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I don't really recommend satellite broadband. You still need to connect via dial up for the uplink. The satellite only provides the downlink. If you want a satellite broadband that can do both uplink and downlink, it will cost you a fortune. So, for ordinary satellite broadband, the responds still depend on how fast is your dial up. If the dial up is slow, so is your satellite broadband. The other problem is, it will occupy your landline when you're online, since it needs the dial up connection. The only benefit of satellite broadband is it's downlink speed, which is very fast. But overall browsing experience will still be laggy.

If you have copper line, doesn't mean you get broadband. There's 2 factor. The end connection cannot be more than 7km away from the closest exchange(at least it's true for my country), and there must put up a hub(some kind of split up and sharing device, not sure what's it's actually called) in your area, before you can start using broadband. Normally they won't install one unless there's demand in the area, cause it's quite expensive. It happen to my parent house. It took us 2 years before they come and install one. All the the active areas got it 2 years ahead of us.

Anyway, shanus180, you can improve your existing dial up speed but checking into a few factor.
1. The distance of the phone line from the pole to your modem. Try connect to the closest point in the house and see if it improve. Then you'll know what to do next.
2. Branch off. To be able to run at more than 36.6kbps, you need a clear line, meaning low noise. The X2 or V.90 technology relied on the wider frequency band than the V.42 (36.6kbps). So you need a nice and low noise line. One thing that contribute to noisy line is branch off, or 2nd extension. It's quite normal in every house hold. You have a phone in the living room, and another in the kitchen. Then you branch off another one into your room for dial up. Each branch will decreases the impedance of the line, causing a miss match, and each branch also cause ringing. Not a telephone ring, but a signal ringing, where the electrical signal is bounce back from the end of the line of each branch, late coincide at the point of the branch, canceling out or retarded the signal. It's more obvious with high frequency.

So, to avoid that, you can first try to pull out all the branches, not just the phone at the end of the line, but the line itself. Or plug your modem directly to the main inlet box. If you can achieve much higher speed than before. Then you might want to consider pulling a direct line from the main inlet box to your modem. Make the branch from the main inlet box. So, when you want to use dial up, you pull out the branch. Don't worry about incoming call, it's will be engage when you online anyway. Just remember to plug back when you're done. This does sound a bit tedious.

I do have 2 more suggestion. If the branching is what causing the slow speed, then you might want to request for another phone line, straight to your modem. Or, subscribe to data plan from cell operator, if your area has EDGE/3G/HSDPA/UMTS/TDMA coverage. With 3G, you actually get speed close to broadband, at least for us here. Our broadband ain't that fast. If you surf a lot, make sure you get an unlimited data plan, also check the fine print if they limit your total bandwidth. Some limit to 3gb of data per month, even for "unlimited data plan".

 

 

 

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I was going to suggest the same thing, but you have to be aware of the prices. In Belgium you get mobile internet for €5/month + €1/day that you connect to the internet. It doesn't seem much, but it can cost you up to €36/month for a rather slow connection and a very limited download volume (1Gb/month)

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My parents home has the same issue with dialup speeds, and the things suggested thus far seem like the best bets. I know in another topic we have recently been reminded of the idea of using two phone lines with two modems/ISP accounts to in effect double dialup speeds. I haven't looked into this so am not sure about the logistics or how well it works but might be something worth googling if it wouldn't cost you more than you're willing to spend (regardless you're going to have to invest some money in this to boost speeds more then likely).

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For us, it used to be RM99(USD30€20) to RM120(USD38/€25) per month. With 3GB of data limit per month. That's for the 2 big telco. Now the smaller one is putting up competition with RM66(USD21/€14) per month, and unlimited, which is quite within reach for most of the needy. Further more it's unlimited. But the speed is limited to EDGE only. Cause the smaller telco can get a 3G license to operate in our country, due to political reason. With EDGE, I've ran a speed test on speedtest.com, download is around 200kbps while upload is 40kbps. Ping = 900ms. That's why there's no data limit per month, cause no matter how much you download, it will never reach 3GB for sure. For normal surfing and minor downloading it's quite good. With 3G you can get up to a few mbps. But I've done any live testing yet.

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The 56k is the theoretical speed. However, it depends from how busy the supplier server is, and how many people are connected at the same time. I had this problem a couple of years ago, and, unfortunately for you, 28.8 is the realistic average speed you should be able to access with this type of connexion. The speed technically goes up if the server is free, and goes down if you are far from the server and the server sees too many retries on the line.

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well guys ill give all of this a look. Thx to all especially faulty.lee that was tremendous help. Hopefully i can get broadband soon and get out of this dial up death. haha thanks for the advice

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Actually the connection speed is the physical connection speed. It depends on the hardware and the condition of the line. Not related to the server. You can get connected at 56k if you're very near to the exchange. I used to get around 42 to 48k, with around 10km from the exchange. Then, as for what yordon mention, the server speed, it's the actual download speed you get. So, if you're connected at 56k, theoretically, you should be downloading at 56kbps/8bit = 7kB/s (kilo bytes), minus some protocol overhead, plus some compression, more or less there. But if you're downloading at only say 4kB/s, that means there's bottleneck somewhere. Either it's the server that you download from it's slow, which is not the case nowadays, or at least not happening here, or it's your ISP that's the bottleneck, as mention by yordon, the server is busy.

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