As an interesting aside, and not of particular relevance to the problems encountered getting modems to work I want to ramble on about modems and serial port speeds.
I have said some rude things in the past about about my ISP's outsourcing the termination of my dial up Internet connections to Telstra Clear and their Lucent network access server equipment. I appreciate however of their implementation of the new V44 PPP compresion protocol. Where the data being transfered is particularly suited to compression, such as text, the throughput of the uncompressed data from modem to computer is very impressive. For example when I do an emerge --sync with Gentoo the downloading of the file list rattles along at up to 13 KB/sec.[1] One expert on the V44 protocol reckoned that the data uncompressed by the modem had the potential to overwhelm the serial connection where the modem was connected by this method. If circumstances compell you to use dial up internet and are willing to overcome the obstacles that seem to go with Linux and modems you can get some decent usage from dail up. Read more at; http://www.modemsite.com/56k/v92c.asp Cheers Ross Drummond [1] Yes I know those on adsl & cable will not be impressed but hark back to the the speeds you used to get in the days when you were on dial up yourselves.
