Modem Overclocking Type Deal

[Kowood]

Most of us probably know what overclocking is....If I know correctly, it's when you mess with your hardware to make it go faster or something to that effect. Is there a way I could overclock/reclock my modem to work with Linux?

[Harry Kuhman]

Basically, no.

Analog modems are already modern marvels. They are pulling off amazing tricks to get the capacity out of an audio system that they do. Just as importantly, a modem has to work with another modem to talk with it. So if you could improve on a modem you would have to have compatable equipment also capable of higher speeds on the other end for it to work. And just increasing the CPU rate (overclocking) will in no way improve a modems ability to transmit data faster. It's unlikely (but not completely out of the question) that we'll see faster analog modems, but it will not be done by clocking the devices faster. There is a lot of information on the 'net about how modems work, you might want to research some of it.

There are some things that can be done with cable modems, but these are illegal. Basically the cable system is capable of higher speeds than cable modems offer the customer (in fact many cable systems have recently automatically increased their customers speeds by sending commands to their customers modems). People have hacked modems to increase the speed without cooperation from the cable compamy, but this is illegal theft of service, and can be detected and caught.

[Kowood]

well...vouloir est pouvoir...where there's a will, there's a way....i think i've got a driver for my modem...i don't know how to make it work though. it's in debian form...i've got kanotix bug hunter x fix 2

[Harry Kuhman]

well...vouloir est pouvoir...where there's a will, there's a way...
I'm not sure why you bothered to ask then. But please do report your progress with overclocking your modem.

[Kowood]

Well...I thought someone here might have had the will and foudn the way. :P

[Harry Kuhman]

Well...I thought someone here might have had the will and foudn the way. :P
Actually, at least one of us here has experience with quadrature modulation and Multi-dimensional Trellis coding, as well as at least some basic experience with DSP, and understands the "tricks" used to make 56k modems work (hint: The modem on the other end of your 56k analog connection is not connected by an analog line) The limiting factor with analog modems is line characteristics, not processing power for the modem. For that matter, most modems now available are "software modems", the hardware is just a very fast d/a - a/d converter and a software dsp package to do the actual modem functions. So when you overclock a cpu or just put the modem in a faster computer you do overclock the modem as well. Thankfully, the modem dsp software is smart enough to not be cpu speed dependent and kills time so that the sending and receiving modems stay in sync. But do keep us posted on how just overclocking increases your modem speed, there hasn't been much of an improvement in analog modems in seven or eight years, longer if you don't count v.92 (which basically only improved the innitial connection time over v.90 and added an additional compression protocol, two things that both sides have to agree on). While cpu speeds have more or less followed More's law in that time period, the entire industry has completely missed your insight that all that is needed to speed up modems is to overclock one side of the connection. Do keep us updated on your progress with this. :wink: