Were you manning a phone? Did you do an electronics apprenticeship? You didn't get down and dirty in the line pits right?

Ring the telco and ask if you are on a pair gain line, your modem will never get over the 28k mark if you are. Pair gain lines are fine for voice but modem don't like them.

mcleodnine you will find that you have the same problem with the DSL, the equipment they connect to the line effects your modem the same way as the pair gain equipment.

In Australia they always have spare lines that aren't pair gain, after you ring and complain enough (just keep ringing) about running your business from home and can't get enough internet modem speed they eventually change you over to a normal line.

gcombe74 You should have asked for a communications tech not a linux guru. Copper phone lines (as well as all comms medium) are measured in Hertz, not bits per second. The bandwidth of copper lines is huge, the limiting factor for your phone line is the exchange equipment it is connected to, that equipment (until ADSL) has a bandwidth of 3kHz or so.

History lesson: In the original modems a 1kHz tone was a single bit, 0 and a 2kHz tone was a 1, so baud and bps were always the same. The phone line allows you to change from the 1k tone to the 2k tone and back up to 3000 times in one second, throw in a margin for error and you have 2400 baud.

Then someone really clever came along and worked out how to use 4 tones and make each tone equal two bits, so 1k=00 , 1.5k=01, 2k=10 and 2.5k=11. The tones still changed from one tone to one of the others at 2400 times in one second but since each tone equalled 2 bits, you had 2400 baud modems giving you 4800 bits per second (bps).

Now days they have more than 4 tones and each tone represents ALOT more than 2 bits but they still only change between tones 2400 times in a second, the phone line is incapable of doing more, so technically you still have a 2400 baud modem.

The telcos only gaurantee 3600kHz (not bps) and it wasn't the government that set a limit, it's a limit of the technology. Copper wire and the exchanges only have a limited bandwidth. As you can imagine the more bits per tone you want to represent the more tones you have to have to do that. You can only squeeze so many tones between the upper and lower bandwidth mark before they start to tread on one anothers toes. 56k modems also do some tricks with compression algorithims and stuff to give you more for your bandwidth.

Hazza96,

Thanks for the comm 101 refresher course. The point being that his cable has limitations. I agree with your synopsis of his cable problem, I have numerous friends that have connection problems due to wiring to these pairs that think that I am nuts when giving them the same advice and reasoning. Wire is wire right? LOL

Cheers