Ask Juan - Question and Answer
Faster Than a Speeding Dialup
Question:
I am a dialup user but my ISP offers hi-speed dialup. How does hi-speed dialup work and will it speed up my emails, downloads and browsing? I'm just not ready to go DSL.
Answer:
There is no such thing as high-speed dialup. The maximum speed (per FCC regulations) for a dialup connection is 53 Kilobits per second (Kbps.) Even though all the modems of the world are labeled 56kbps. You can imagine this concept as having a car that is able to go 100 miles per hour, yet you are limited by the 55-miles per hour limit.
Another limitation of modems is that they communicate over plain old telephone systems (POTS) and as such some of those telephone lines are very old and contain a lot of noise. Making the connection slower than the limit (53kbps.)
Continuing with the car analogy, the speed one could drive would not be as high when the road is a dirt road versus driving on a paved highway. Therefore, you may experience slower connections over bad telephone lines. That is why sometimes one might get connected at 24k and sometimes at 48k.
The quality of the vehicle is also a factor for speed. So if you are driving a beat-up Volkswagen Beatle from the 60s, say a Windows ME machine with a 1.2 Gigahertz Pentium III processor, you would not surf as fast as a Windows XP, 3.4 Gigahertz Pentium 4 Porche. Newer computers get connected consistently higher than older computers.
So how does high-speed dialup work, you ask? Simple, imagine diving the VW and you can only have 4 passengers. What if you want have a family of five or six? You make extra trips, or… you sit a couple of kids on someone's lap. What if they are all adults and they are too big to fit in the car? Then you are out of luck. You WILL have to make extra trips.
The same is true for dialup connections. If the information can be compressed into smaller packets or can tucked into digital nooks and crannies, then the connection will seem to be faster. But if the information being transferred is not compressible like pictures or MP3s, which are already compressed by nature, then the speed will seem the same as the regular dialup connection… because it is.
The service provider that offers "high-speed" dialup will have a compressor program that will examine your data for possible “shrinkage” if it can shrink it, it will send it to you in a smaller packet. Your computer will also have a similar program that decompresses the data received into the regular packets expected. If your computer is fast enough, you will notice a slight difference. Because this concept to work depends on the speed of your computer, if your pc is slow, then you might be slowing your seemingly faster connection back to normal or slower.
Bottom line, if you are using the Internet, including email to download text, it will help and "high-speed dialup" is worth it. On the other hand if you are using it to download pictures of your bid on eBay or music files, it will not help.Reader Comments
I found your anology of the high speed dialup compression very clear and easy for most people to understand. However, the actual results will depend upon what compression technique the ISP is providing. (I use DSL now) Previously I used a dialup - Access-4-Free - that provided a very good compression software. The biggest feature was that it was able to produce lossful compression. To use your example - ebay pictures - it would allow you to do the initial download with a lossful algorithm and get the pictures, but they would be grainy and less clear (very fast). Once you had narrowed down your search and wanted to get a clear image of certain items you just right-click the image and tell it to reload without any compression and you had the full image (slow). This provided a great way to browse but still be able to get the full "picture" when you wanted/needed it. Keep up the great newsletter. -- R.P. (GodZGood.com)