> >I'd never buy a modem form the US full stop. US Telephony system use > >different standards and the above BABT thing is also a fairly good reason. > > > >-- > > > >Mark Benson > > mark, that is misleading. > > i bought a 56k Global Village in the US, it has worked fine day in, day > out for over 14 months.
Probably I shouldn't admit to such illegal activity, but a long time ago when modems were very expensive, I bought a 14k modem for half the price in the states. I uesd it for years with no problem, and quite frankly I find that most modems you buy in this country, even if BABT approved (and some of the ones over here aren't either!) are re-badged U.S. modems, very often they don't even have a socket suitable for a uk phone to plug into. > great thing is more and more stuff comes with 100-240 V power supplies > too. just out of interest, what difference does would it make to USB > modems if they are taking their power from the puter? Internal modems also take the power from the computer, I think mark is refering to the fact that telephone systems have their own power supplies! It's preety wonderful really, it means that if there is a power failure, then your telephones carry on working! (well not your cordless phones maybe!) This is what the whole REN rating thing is about, and why you aren't allowed to connect more than about 4 normal phones to your socket. I don't think modems use the power supply from the phone line at all. Whats more, in this modern day and age, it has become quite common for people to travel with modems and use adaptors for different countries, despite the difference in telephone standards. > what would interest me is how USB modems are improving speedwise, the > first ones were dire. know someone took a PC USB modem, stuck it in his Interesting. I'd love to hear about this too! In theory they should be a lot faster, 56k modems with compression have quite a bottleneck in the serial interface, because once the data is uncompressed it can be quite a substatial amount of data going over the serial line. USB modems with their incredible bandwidth, should be easily able to cope with this. This becomes more of an issue with V92 as well, where the compression is better and the upload speeds are faster too. I always imagined that USB would be wonderful, so I'm dissapointed to hear of your observations. Yes I'd love to hear more on USB modems too! :) love Freya -- Mac UK is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 123Inkjets.com <http://lowendmac.com/ad/123inkjets.html> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Mac UK list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/mac-uk.html> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac-uk%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Macintosh? Get free email and more at Applelinks! <http://www.applelinks.com>
