weird dial up download thing

[unhappy]

every time i start a download w/ dial up, the first few seconds it has incredible speed (for dial up) around 20-30 kB/sec. after few seconds it settles on 3-4 kB/sec and just continues like that. does anyone know why does this happen and is there any way to maintain the speed on around its original throttle.

[©opy®ight]

Even if it's displaying 20-30 its most likely still downloading at 5-6, when i had dial-up 9 kb/s was the maximum. Thats the normal speed for dial-up. You could try Download Accelerator (thats what i used) http://www.speedbit.com/DAP7/Default.asp?

btw: DAP has spyware so i would scan with ad-aware, spybot etc after installing it. Thats what i did and didnt have problem after that, worked fine.

thanks WiskiC for reminding me of the spyware in it.

[wiskic10_4]

No Problem, ©opy®ight...

Also, I've always been skeptical of download accelerators - I mean, 56K is 56K... I've not seen significant results using any download accelerators in my own experience, and they are almost always loaded w/ malware... In the end, most will end up slowing your connection even more...

If you're forced to use dial-up, may I suggest d/l and installing Mozilla Firefox, and using the pause/resume features in the download manager (pausing while surfing, etc., and then resuming all when you get off the computer...)

-Wiski C.

EDIT: To answer the *original* question - no, I'm not sure why that happens, but I know that it happens on most dial-up downloads (I know it sucks, too - "Wow! 30K/sec!!! oh... damn... back to 1.15... ). But, no - there isn't a way to keep the d/l rate the same... If there were, I doubt many would have switched to broadband in the first place...

[unhappy]

this is someting i have noticed for years w/ many different browsers and many different OS's...

it must be something else

i really think it's downloading at that speed (at the beggining) since you can see the file actualy getting bigger. if you have a dial up try it right now w/ any file and notice the download window. if you don't use dial up try metconnect for free to test if you want

[:Singh:]

Hi unhappy, your speed settles at 3-4 KBPS but mine starts at 40-50 for the first few sec and comes down to 1-2 in evening and 6-7 in the morning. It don't know why we call it 56k.

Tip1: For best results, download exclusively. I mean stop surfing the webpages.

Tip2: If you want a *superficial* speed boost while downloading(in DAP). 'Suspend' the download for few mins and then 'Resume'. Your speed will be then 30-40 but it will decrease gradually. (won't work if you are using a GPRS).

Hi Wiski, how about making Download Manager(firefox) and DAP compete. Try downloading the same stuff with DAP and the other. See the results yourself.

My ques to broadband users-Is your speed stable?

cheers!!

[©opy®ight]

My ques to broadband users-Is your speed stable?

um nope. mine starts around 900 and stops around 600 on a good server....

[unhappy]

ok ... since everyone agrees ... do you have any idea why is the speed higher at the beggining and how to keep it that way

"uncapping the dial-up"

[nihil]

Don't forget to divide by 8, or multiply if you are going the other way. The 56.6 is bits, but your download rate is bytes.

You will be lucky to get a connection much better than 50kBbits/s due to the quality of your telephone connection, and your true download trate is unlikely to exceed 5Kbytes

If you readings are higher I would say they are false.

I have a theory (based purely on surmise and guesswork) that it is something to do with how the dial-up connects. If you look at a phone cable you will see that there are more wires than you actually need. One of them (I think it is the blue one over here) is only used when the initial connection is established (the telephone equivalent of SYN/ACK).

Now a few years back, there was talk over here of using that wire to provide what was described at the time as "mid-band" internet at a speed somewhere between dial-up and broadband.

I don't know why this connection is faster, only that it is, and that might explain why you get a sudden burst of speed at the beginning?

If you have a very bad connection, you might get your telco to increase the gain on the line......... that would speed it up a small amount.

Remember that there have been no improvements on 56.6 in the past 5 years, so I guess that is the limit for that technology.

No, it is not capped as such, and no you cannot do anything about it

[unhappy]

in us there are actualy 4 wires

hmmm ... gotta do some more reading on all this

[ikalo]

Like Nihil said 56k is 56.6kbps = 7,075 kBps ... ofcourse this is only theoretical max speed.
Don't forget parity bits, errors, retransmitions etc.

In my contry we use only two wires, and I have the same thing when starting download over dial-up. It doesn't matter if I use IE or DAP.
Here is my theory:
when you start download, while you point to folder where it is going to be saved, download engine (or whatever it is) is buffering that file somewhere in RAM or TEMP file. When you click on SAVE that buffered data is transfered to it final destination, and you have high speed displayed. After that you have the real speed displayed. Actualy I guess that this speed is calculated with difference in file size measured after predefined time interval.

In DAP, when you click on SUSPEND, download is not stoped. It uses extra bandwith (that is not used for browsing at that moment, for example) to buffer data. When you resume, the same thing happens, you have large data flow to file on disk from some temoprary storage/buffer (probably RAM) and high speed calculated. I think this is only marketing trick.

I use download managers only because dial-up has tendency to brake connection, so I can resume download. Or if I'm geting large (101MB for example) file, I can do it for several nights. there is no speed increase.

56k is 56k.... everything you see above 6kBps is only illusion