Two Easy Modem Settings that Can Improve Your Browsing Speed
A large portion of the help our customers seek involves getting the best possible connection for their computer. This week’s letter shows some adjustments that may improve your dial-up connection speed.
Slow connection speeds are generally the result of two factors, the physical phone line your computer uses to connect to the Internet and your computer’s modem. Because dial-up connections use a standard phone line, your connection speed is largely dependent on the quality of the phone line that you are connected to. If you live in an area where there is a lot of line noise on the phone lines, you are not going to be able to connect at the same speeds that you would if you lived in an area with higher quality lines.
The physical phone cable you use to connect your computer to the wall jack is also a factor. This cable should be as short as possible and should not go through a phone line splitter or other devices. Each of these decreases the quality of the telephone signal.
If you have a fax or answering machine on the same phone line as the computer, move these to the connection on the “outside” of the computer. Many modems have two connectors, one to connect to the wall and the other to the telephone itself (the “outside” one we mention).
The second factor is the configuration of your modem. We will cover two important modem settings. You can find instructions to alter these settings and others in the help section of the GoBigWest homepage. Click on the setup section and then modems.
The first setting is the modem speed. This is found in the modem properties and is typically set by default to 115200 bps, which is twice as fast as your 56k modem. This means that your computer is trying to “talk” to your modem faster than your modem is designed to “listen”. By changing this setting to 57600 bps (the equivalent of 56k), you are telling your computer to talk to the modem at a speed that the modem can understand. This decreases the number of times that your computer has to repeat instructions so you will experience faster downloads with the correct setting. The U.S. and Canadian government sets the maximum connect speed to 53k. Good phone lines will generally get you a speed in the 48k to 52k range. It is rare to get higher speeds with a dial-up connection.
The second setting, the flow control, tells your computer what general type of modem you are using. Modems, are either hardware-based or software-based. Hardware modems have more processing in the modem itself while software modems depend on the rest of the computer to handle the signals. By default, your computer treats a modem as a hardware-based modem, although the majority of modems today are software-based. As a general rule, internal modems are software-based and external modems, Pccard (PCMCIA) laptop modems, or V34 modems are hardware-based. Laptops with built in modems can be either hardware or software-based. This means that if you have a desktop computer that came with a modem, you most likely have a software-based modem and may benefit from setting your flow control to software. If you would like, you can experiment with this setting to find out what works best for your computer. There is no harm in switching this setting back and forth so you can simply try both hardware and software and compare the results. As with the modem speed setting, instructions to change the flow control can also be found in the modem section of the GoBigWest help pages.
