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I used to get high 56K speeds, but now I get 33,600 or below! Why?!This major drop in speed which means your modem is now making connections at the older 33.6K standard (V.34) and not the 56K V.90. Typically, this occurs often after periods of extended or heavy rain. Many of NC's local phone services operate on underground phone lines installed in the mid 1950s, which are very susceptible to moisture. We have found that entire service areas have reported consistently lower speeds for several days following showers or storms. The water causes noise and distortion in the underground phone lines. This is a telephone company issue and it happens to all ISPs in the region. Pulaski Networks cannot be responsible for this. When you place a call, it may travel one of several different paths to your telephone company. If one path is noisier than the other, your connection speed for that call will suffer. Phone companies upgrade and reroute routes daily, so you are at the mercy of where they route your call. While the general trend has been towards improving connections to outlying and residential areas, any modifications done to their network may impact your ability to get 56K speeds. Sometimes people who bought a computer several months prior will perform software upgrades (new modem drivers) and then reinstall their operating system, use a rescue disk, or inadvertently overwrite the newer modem driver with an older one. This is especially true of any user with a software controlled modem which currently include Rockwell HCF, HSP, Lucent or LT Winmodems, USR/3COM Sportster Winmodems and many other Winmodems modems that include a Rockwell or Lucent chipset. Major vendors that use these modems are Compaq, HP, IBM, Creative Labs, Hayes, Aopen and Diamond. These problems can typically be corrected by finding the latest 56k v.90 driver from the modem vendors website, downloading it, installing it and rebooting. Continuing on the Software controlled modems idea, you should realize that what makes software controlled modems so inexpensive is the fact that their high-speed digital signal processor (DSP or "brain") has been removed, and your computer's processor is emulating, or "pretending" to be that chip. Modem manufacturer tests have shown that software controlled modems can take up to 25% of the computer's processing power to operate. This not only makes your computer run slower, it means that when you're using your processor to run applications, such as Microsoft Word, Access, or Internet Explorer, they have to steal some processor time from the modem. This can lead to disconnects, lower connect speeds, and quite frequently, system freezes. Most newer computers are very fast, so this performance hit will not be crippling, however on any machine slower than a Pentium II 400, software controlled modems will cause degraded performance. Microsoft Windows, especially on store-bought computers, typically starts up many programs when you turn on the computer. They are usually visible in the bottom right of your screen, near the clock. If you must use a Winmodem, consult your Windows documentation on how to stop these programs from starting up, and when dialing into the Internet, do not open any applications until the connection has been established. This may help increase your initial connect speed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
