The speed of your dial up connection is the speed of your connection to your
ISP; it is the speed of the connection over the phone lines from your modem
to their modem.  As far as the bandwidth or amount of data that can be
carried this will be the "smallest pipe" when you are downloading
information off of the internet.

However, as you visit various sites with your browser, you may find some
times that you are waiting for the page to appear or for the site to respond
to your browser in other ways.  This has less to do with the speed of your
connection and more to do with the amount of traffic that site is trying to
handle.  It may simply not be able to dish out the information fast enough
to all the people accessing the site at the same time.  You'll have to wait
your turn.  This will be a much more noticeable effect than the difference
between 34 kbs and 46 kbs download speeds for your modem's connection.

I suppose the congestion could also be taking place at the level of your
ISP, if they don't have the bandwidth to handle all the customers that are
connected to their modems at the busiest times.  It sounds like their mail
servers, for example, can get a bit sluggish at peak times.

John

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Grossman" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 8:15 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Modem speed


> I'm confused about modem speed.
>
> I have a dial-up connection that ranges from about 34 to 46 Kbps. That
speed
> seems to have no bearing on the actual speed that I can surf the Web, or
the
> speed that I can upload or download e-mail.

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