> "If you have analog voice lines like most people your phone company will
> tell you 33.6k is the maximum consistent level of service."
>
> My phone company, Bell Atlantic, absolutely refuses to say what modem
> transfer speed my phone line is capable of, and they refuse to say what
> speed I can expect if I order a new, better line.

     That is true, phone companies used to have to guarantee that the line
will support a 300bps modem, nothing more. Now the stance is if you can talk
on the line the phone company has done their job. If you are having troubles
and want the phone company to check the line, never tell them your modem
isn't working well. Say that you hear noise or static on the line, that they
have to fix.

> "The Winmodem like many PCI modems are soft modems and do not have a
> built in controller to handle buffering."
>
> Can you explain how this deficiency will show in performance?

     Performance wise none. If the computer is fast enough to handle the
modem then you will get the same throughput as you would with a hardware
modem. The difference is the amount of resources the modem needs. A hardware
modem needs practically nothing of the CPU, an XT would work as well as a
Pentium III. A software modem on the other hand demands some CPU resources
to work, some are very small, 2 or 3 %, some are quite alot when alot of
things are happening like around 10%. This may seem like nothing, and it is
if all you do is email and surf. However for online gaming and such this is
quite a bit more of a problem. Aside from all this, a softmodem, being what
it is, is much easier to crash and is much better at crashing your system
since it is practically a part of windows, if it goes down, some parts of
windows could go down. Forget it if you don't use windows though. TTYL

                         PCBUILD's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>