I have a real bad dialup connection and I can only get 24k. I pretty sure it's the phone line itself because when I take my laptop to a friend's house, I get a "strong" 48k.

I remember reading that there was some kind of test the phone company was required to do if a customer requested. Does anyone know what this is?

I thought I bookmarked where I read this but alas, I can't seem to find it. And since I can't remember what the test was, I can't google for it. I would be "happy" for 36k althought I don't know what would be a realistic expectation.

Needless to say I could think of a few web designers that I would like to invite over, tie up and make them watch their pages render.
Fortunately, this particular site is not as greedy on the bandwidth as some others.

I should add that proliferation (or lack thereof) of broadband probably has some indirect effect on whether or not one chooses to adopt Linux in general.

i think there are line tests they can run to chk the signal levels and a signal to noise ratio .... not sure if they do this for dialup though. dsl and cable have it...

You didn't mention whether the crappy dial-up is direct or through some pabx.

Only mention it because I live in the hotel which employs me and I have been told that faster than 19.8 k is not possible through the pabx. Got a direct line to my room and saw some improvement to ~30k

mark

They can run a line noise test, but they will probably tell you that the noise is at an acceptable level for phone use. A phone will tolerate more line noise than a modem. Are you using some type of internal winmodem? If so you might try an external hardware modem. I tried everything , and then switched to cable broadband.