Remedial connection question...

Exfoliate

Exfoliate

Geek Trainee
Hey guys, I have a really n00bish question that's kind of been bugging me for a while. It's embarrasing that I don't know but I've always been pretty clueless about networking and connectivity anyway.
So say you have a looser connection like me. I've got a 56k modem, I connect at 48k or so, I dowload at about 3-5kps (:eek:) . What I don't understand is what exactly the connection speed is refering to? 48k is relative to what? Is the the speed at which I'm connected to my ISP or something? And why are upload and download speeds always a very small percentage or the total connection speed? I'm sadly clueless. Help a poor lost man out please.
 
Exfoliate said:
Hey guys, I have a really n00bish question that's kind of been bugging me for a while. It's embarrasing that I don't know but I've always been pretty clueless about networking and connectivity anyway.
So say you have a looser connection like me. I've got a 56k modem, I connect at 48k or so, I dowload at about 3-5kps (:eek:) . What I don't understand is what exactly the connection speed is refering to? 48k is relative to what?
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a download speed of 48K is pretty good, 48K is relative to the theoretical maximum download speed of 56K (the maximum of 56K is never actually achived)
Exfoliate said:
Is the the speed at which I'm connected to my ISP or something?
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exactly
Exfoliate said:
And why are upload and download speeds always a very small percentage or the total connection speed?
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this i don't know
 
A major factor of dial up connection speed is the quality of the copper phone line. A low quality line may cause a lot of dropped packets, this causes extra overhead for the error checking mechanisms, so you don't get the theoretical maximum speed.
 
Thanks for clearing that up some for me guys. I feel a little better now. It's just crazy to think that out of the 56k potential we dial-up users only ever see a smidgen of it actually utilized when downloading, making a loser connection seem every junkier.
 
Exfoliate said:
Thanks for clearing that up some for me guys. I feel a little better now. It's just crazy to think that out of the 56k potential we dial-up users only ever see a smidgen of it actually utilized when downloading, making a loser connection seem every junkier.
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That's 56 kiloBITS, and you normally measure files in BYTES, which are 8 bits. So your connection actually maxes out at a theoretical 7kiloBYTES per second, but even 5.5k is decent for a dialup line. The reason that you can get a lot more bandwidth out of the same line with ADSL is because dialup only uses the audible spectrum of the copper, which is a very tiny range. ADSL uses all the rest.
 
Thanks man, I do seem to recall one of my more tech-minded refer to kilobits before, totally lost track of that though. This makes a lot more sense now that I get about 3-5kbs if it maxes out at 7kbs. But if that's how most files are measured then why don't they just call it a 7k connection?
 
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