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What Determines My Connection Speed?
This is an often asked question and it is also very hard to answer. A modem will connect as fast as it can while maintaining a stable connection. When connecting to us, your modem must first connect through the telephone company, which in and of itself is a collection of 100 year old wires, cables, and equipment. The telephone company's job is connecting you to us, with your call whole and intact. We (Enter.net) are also a customer of the telephone company just like everyone else is and we are dependent completely on the telephone company in delivering the call.
Customers often confuse low connect speeds with poor modems on the Provider's end. Although this is a possibility, today with digital modems it really is no longer a factor. The speed that a 56K modem will connect to is totally and absolutely dependent upon the sum total of all the line impairments from the back of your modem to the digital telephone network. The one overriding argument that really explains the whole thing in a nutshell is this: If the telephone lines between the customer and the Provider are absolutely perfect and support the frequencies necessary to obtain bandwidths up to 56K the customer will absolutely without a doubt connect at the highest speed their modem can obtain regardless of the brand of the modem that the provider chooses or the configuration that is performed or not performed on those same modems.
Another way to look at this is when telephones were invented, they were made to transmit the human voice over long distance.. not modem signals (Modems not being invented back when Alexander Graham Bell came up with the telephone idea). Modems are designed to "break" rules, and transmit data (digital information) from one side, over analog copper wires, then reconstruct the data as flawlessly as possible on the other side. Technically, the telephone company was designed around the idea of supporting range of frequency of the human voice.. (300-1600hz).. Now, modems send and receive information at ranges up to and beyond 3000hz but still, the phone company is still only "designed" for human ears. Modems operate far beyond anything you and I can hear (Like a dog whistle to a dog). The phone system, looking back over the numbers, clearly was not designed with this in mind.
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