The cause of a slow connection can be frustrating and sometimes hard to pinpoint.
Sometimes the problem is a bad phoneline. It can be in the street, your home
or anywhere between your computer and ours. Outlying areas often have poor phone
lines and or repeaters that slow your connection speeds.
The newer 56k modems while touting faster connection speeds are much more
sensitive to noise and if they get interference they read it as corrupt data
and will retrain themselves to a lower rate.
For all the buzz about how 56k will change your life, a lot can go
wrong. Even the technology's name is little more than wishful thinking:
you won't achieve 56 kbps, even under the best conditions, for
technological and bureaucratic reasons. To help you understand why,
here's a list of all the potential barriers between you and that magic number.

System settings Be sure all your Internet protocols and system settings are optimized for connection
to TCSN.NET This includes TCP/IP settings, network settings and dial-up
networking settings. Extra protocols or bindings slow down your data transfer.
Check our web page all about Speeding Up your connection or call our tech support.

Poor phoneline quality
The bad news? Anything that adds noise to the telephone line or causes
an analog-to-digital conversion between your ISP and your modem lessens
the transmission's performance. Worse than that, if there's nasty noise
on the phone line, your only solution may be to move. Scream all you
want, but the telephone company is obligated only to provide you with a
clean enough line to get 4,800-bps data rates. But those aren't your
only potential troubles. Usually The problem is a dirty line (static, crosstalk, interference)
Pacbell will usually check your lines for free if you dial service:611
but will not support any thing over 4,800 so be sure to say that you are having
problems with fax transmissions. The FCC says "no more than 53 kbps"
Though your modem says it's "56k," you won't get throughput that fast,
thanks to a speed limit set by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission).
The reason for that regulation? Sending a signal down a
telephone wire requires electrical power. But the more power you apply,
the greater the chance of a problem called crosstalk.
To help prevent crosstalk, the FCC limits the amount of power that phone
companies can use to send signals over the network.
And this cap on signal strength limits data throughput to a maximum of 53 kbps,
regardless of what your modem can actually deliver.

Office PBX systems
If you have to dial 9 to get an outside line, your office uses a digital
PBX telephone system, which means you also won't be able to achieve
56k rates. A PBX system incorporates a codec that performs an
analog-to-digital conversion so that your calls can be stored digitally
on magnetic media, such as hard disks. Though this system gives you some
great features, such as employee extensions and call forwarding, it also
limits your 56k calls to a maximum throughput of about 35 kbps.
 
Pads and Switches
There may also be a "pad" between you and the central office. A pad
balances the volume on both ends of the line when you make a call. If
the pad occurs before the signal is converted to analog, you'll see
only a slight degradation in 56k performance. But if you encounter an
analog pad between the central office and your home, up crops another
analog-to-digital conversion to sabotage your 56k connection.
Some local lines also run through an amplifier called a load coil to
boost the signal rates across longer distances. Load coils cause some
signal distortion and will detrimentally affect your modem's 56k
throughput potential. During testing we also tested a long local loop
containing a load coil and many of the products fell back to 28-kbps rates.
The part of the telephone system which you may be most able to improve
is your telephone premises wiring. If you rarely get 33.6 or 28.8
connects, try the following:

Premises Wiring . . .
Often faulty premises wiring, bad phone jacks and plugs, cordless phones
cheap phones, old/antique phones, or too many phones or other
devices cause problems.
Here is how to determine if your premises wiring or equipment is
affecting your CONNECT quality. Find the telco wiring block where
all your premises wiring connects -- it will usually be outside or
inside of your house near where the phone line comes in. Look at the
interior wiring. The best wiring is "twisted pair". Most older,
non-twisted pair wiring consists of four wires in a single jacket. The
individual wires have solid color insulation (green, red, yellow and
black -- but only the green and red wires are normally used on a
single-line system). Twisted pair wiring consists of matched pairs
of wires, normally 2 or 3 pairs in a single jacket. The two wires in
each pair are twisted around each other in a gentle spiral. Of each
pair, one wire has a colored insulation with a white stripe, and its
mate is white with a matching colored stripe (I.e. white with blue
stripe and blue with white stripe).

If you have non-twisted pair wiring, you should consider replacing
it. But whether you have twisted pair or not, you may want to try this
experiment. Run a good quality twisted pair phone cable directly
between the block and the phone jack that serves your modem, routing
so as to avoid other electrical wiring and devices -- and then
disconnect all other premises wiring from the telco block. If this
gives you faster connects, then your premises wiring or your phone
equipment is causing you trouble. Reconnect wiring and phone devices
incrementally while retrying the modem to see if you can find the
culprit. Examine each plug and jack, and reseat each several times.
Where visible, inspect the routing of the phone wiring to assure it
steers clear of other wiring and electrical devices. If you find
some of your equipment or premises wiring is contributing to the
problem, the recommended solution is to replace or eliminate the
equipment and/or wiring. My own experience proved it to me
when something as simple as moving my computer 6 Mi. closer to town
with no other modifications increased my connect speed from 26.4 to
a much faster 48.0 nearly doubling my download rate. Believe it or not
from outlying areas a 28.8 modem will often give you a better transfer rate
because it's not as sensitive to noise and will (at least most of the time)
connect at a solid 28.8.